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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29598732">Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle'>pipistrelle</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Moby Dick - Herman Melville, The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Body Horror, Diary/Journal, F/F, Gen, Hallucinations, Multi, Seafaring AU, Whaling au</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:02:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>29,755</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29598732</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Being the journal of Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus, chronicling the journey of the Emperor's warship Cenotaph on its hunt to slay an immortal Resurrection Beast.</p><p>Or: the Moby Dick crossover AU that nobody asked for.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cam/Pal/Dulcie, Camilla Hect/Dulcinea Septimus, Dulcinea Septimus/Palamedes Sextus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Moorings</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks (and blame) to bree on the discord server, who encouraged me to write this thing that no one needed! You're great, hope you like it!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>PRESCRIPT</p><p>I, the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus of the Ninth House, begin this record in addition to my theorem notes as a vain hope, and as hopeful vanity. The last two living daughters of the Ninth go now on a journey from which they will not likely return, which makes this journal the only continuity my House may ever have. It is for their sake that I record my observations and impressions, so that if I fail they may at least know the reasons for my weakness.</p><p>If I succeed but do not live, I desire that this journal be interred with my remains, where no living eye shall ever behold it, in the deepest catacombs that Anastasia carved. Let any who disregard my wishes be excommunicated from the black altar and die unshriven, and may their souls be flogged through the River for a myriad unceasing.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> First day of Cenotaph expedition </em>
</p><p>Arrived on Gadus asteroid outpost. Space sickness is bothersome but tolerable. Tried the placket of grave dirt, but it is a placebo, as I suspected; after an hour it was totally useless. The trip itself lasted seven, as Gadus is on the very outermost border of the Nine Houses system and in fact can be barely counted to belong to it. I must be prepared for the space sickness to persist or even increase. It is imperative that I master my symptoms by the time the other House heirs arrive. I cannot let them see me in this state of weakness -- though their underestimation of my capabilities may be useful.</p><p>Nav, of course, is the picture of health. A picture drawn in crayon by an idiot. If I did not need her for this I would have strangled her with my grandmother's knucklebone rosary just for the thanergy I could drain from her death.</p><p>Accommodations abysmal. The shuttle pilot called it an "inn" but it is a sort of barracks or longhouse, wooden walls (the expense hardly bears contemplating), a few dozen rooms along a central corridor. As the first to arrive I expected to have my pick of situation, but it is not so. The permanent crew of the <em> Cenotaph</em>, which will be boarding with us when the ship arrives, has claimed all rooms but a handful, and all but one of that handful have been staked out by the other heirs in advance. The proprietor of the place (a Mr. Coffin — a pathetic joke, one assumes) would not yield to threats, bribery, or rank. Said he had not been sure that the Ninth House would be making an appearance, so did not know to reserve a room appropriate to my needs. He is insolent and deserves to have the flesh peeled from his bones and his skeleton made a figurehead on one of his own ships.</p><p>The room he finally condescended to give us is hardly bigger than a crypt niche. No powered lights; proprietor made excuses about a faulty generator and lack of fuel this far out. Deliberate insubordination. I would have Nav challenge him if she were useful for absolutely anything, which she is not. I only pray she will be killed by the beast a week into our voyage and a suitable replacement will be provided.</p><p>I sent her to carry in our trunks, but even that task is too complex for her tiny vestigial brain. She complained that I should have skeletons do it. Thought about explaining to her that space sickness makes necromancy impossible currently, but she would undoubtedly take advantage. Finally bribed her into it with the promise of buying her whatever passes for food on this desolate rock.</p><p>I can hear her in the hall. I should have made her take a vow of silence, but I fear the nature of our task may make it untenable. For the same reason I shall refrain from sewing her lips shut with corpse sinew — for now. Though I begin to regret it. She's talking to someone, I assume one of the Cohort stationed here. Discipline is appallingly lax. They're laughing. About what? Doesn't Nav realize that we go in all probability to our deaths, and the death of our House? And she’s laughing.</p><p>I'm sure she's praying the beast will eat me.</p><p>Headache abominable. Must rest.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Next day </em>
</p><p>Headache better. Everything else worse. My person was appallingly violated during the night. Woke up this morning with Nav <em> in my bed</em>! May the festering ghosts of her nameless ancestors haunt her nightmares. If this insolent familiarity is to be the tone of our voyage we will not both survive, and I set it down in record now that it might outlast my death and the death of my heirs: <em> it will be her fault. </em></p><p>I have been forced to try to reconstruct the night’s events, as I was unconscious for most of them. Space sickness forced me to leave Nav unsupervised in the common hall, a combination kitchen and charnel pit where the degenerates on shore leave goad each other with ridiculous tales of martial prowess and poison themselves with some sort of liquor they call "revenant’s blood". I would never have entered it, but it's the only place on the asteroid to get any kind of rations, and Nav was becoming obnoxious. Our robes and paint were enough to keep the soldiers at a distance, but not their smell. Coffin brought us what they call “food”, but that reek combined with the pre-existing odors forced me to retreat to our rooms or destroy the mysticism of the Ninth by vomiting all over my cavalier.</p><p>Perhaps I should have. Instead I spent several hours in misery while Griddle, I assume, drank the revolting liquor favored by these dregs of the Cohort, and was so blind to the world that she crawled into <em><span class="u"> my bed</span></em>(!!) instead of utilizing the cavalier’s cot. I woke up apparently trapped beneath the corpse of a dead bear that stank of sweat and snored like a clogged engine intake. Nav had her arm around me! As though I were her wife (may the King Undying have mercy on whatever poor soul suffers that fate)! I record this only so that, if she survives this journey, an accurate report of her crimes will return to the Ninth and she will receive appropriate punishment. </p><p>I should have brought Ortus. I should have brought Crux.</p><p>I was relieved beyond telling to find that I have regained some capacity for necromancy. Thanergy is still dreadfully scarce, but there was enough to raise a construct to pull Nav off me and dump her on the floor, where she belongs. She muttered an obscenity and went back to sleep.</p><p>She's snoring now. I'll kick her awake once I've done some basic reconnaissance and found a sonic to sit in until the layer of epidermis that she touched is completely obliterated. I can still feel where her arm lay across me; the damn thing is heavy as Samael's chain. </p><p> </p><p>
  <em>Evening </em>
</p><p>Intriguing possibilities and further mysteries. I have taken this time to write while I may, before events overtake us. We are here for only a few more hours while the last preparations are made, then we are to board the <em> Cenotaph </em> in obedience to the Emperor's instructions and begin the hunt for his most lethal and implacable foe.</p><p>Trivialities first: kicked Griddle awake around noon. Tried to berate her for last night's presumption, but she just stared at me and said "Harrow, there's <em> only one bed </em>," in a stupid voice like she was quoting one of her disgusting comics. I pointed out the cav cot placed conveniently for her use at the foot of the four-poster. She said, "That's a bench. Fuck if I'm sleeping on that." Thank the mercy of our Lord we aren't staying here another night.</p><p>The day was taken up with the arrival of the other House heirs. The Second, both starched and predictably military, arrived first; they went directly to the proprietor to discuss "security arrangements" and have been making random patrols of the facility, though finding nothing. The Third House arrived soon after. Twin necromancers! And a cavalier frankly too snide to be believed, but probably more skilled with a rapier than mine. The twins are grotesquely mismatched; one regal and commanding, the other pallid and pitiful. The smaller one seems to take pleasure in behaving suspiciously. She clings to her sister like a shroud, but watches everything and, I have no doubt, misses little. </p><p>With the Second and Third in attendance the common spaces of the inn became too crowded. I dragged Nav back to our room and bolted the door with bone. She whined at first, but when she saw that I was resolute, she resorted to doing her inane exercises, with extra jumping and clapping that I’m certain was intended solely to annoy me. I <em> was </em> annoyed, but that came to nothing. It was and is vital that the other Houses learn nothing about us that we do not wish them to learn. </p><p>At noon a commotion heralded the arrival of another shuttle. Nav was becoming unsubduable, she said out of hunger, so I was forced to go out to obtain more rations. It was not a totally useless trip, as it gave me a good three minutes in which to study the newly-arrived Sixth. The formidable Master Warden appears questionably malnourished, and his cavalier doesn’t say much. He had the coloring of a corpse, no doubt from space sickness, and she kept forcing tea on him, as though that would do any good. They sat at their table in the corner of the main hall making notes and talking too quietly to overhear. Both seemed anxious, which frankly tells me nothing. Lord knows we all have enough to be anxious about, and if they know more than the rest of us (very likely) they won't be willing to share it.</p><p>The other Houses avoided me, of course. Only the Master Warden nodded at me and said “Ninth,” courteously enough. I should have realized that he may be the least susceptible to rumor and superstition. I shall have to keep that in mind.</p><p>The yearning with which Griddle looked out the door on my return to our room made me reconsider the feasibility of a vow of silence. I managed to corner her with a few skeletons and extract from her a promise to keep her hood up and her stupid mouth shut. No idea how long it will last, but every minute we go without spoiling our mystique is an advantage. It's the only advantage we can claim. </p><p>In the afternoon Griddle ran out of physical diversions and threatened to start singing a ditty of her own devising called “Ninety-nine Puking Skulls On the Wall” if I didn’t let her out. Seeing that she wasn’t bluffing, I was forced to concede. At least she kept her vow. Instead of loitering with the others as I had feared, she set to doing what I can only assume were sword-fighting exercises in the little courtyard by the shuttlepad. None of the other cavaliers cried "Imposter!", so her form must pass the most basic level of muster for a half-witted cavalier who's never fought a real duel in her life. I am thankful for these small mercies. And I am thankful that I was therefore in the courtyard myself, keeping an eye on her, to see the last shuttles land and the <em> Cenotaph </em> enter the asteroid's shell of atmosphere.</p><p>The last three shuttles arrived in a cluster before the great ship itself, like fish fleeing a shark. The first of these disgorged the Eighth House cavalier and necromancer like spitting out a couple of rotten teeth. They spoke to no one, and have not spoken since -- possibly they are also under a vow of silence. Possibly even a genuine one.</p><p>Out of another shuttle came four people, two adults and two children, Fifth and Fourth respectively by their colors; but no one paid them any mind. The last shuttle opened to reveal a gigantic man in Seventh green, a lump of frankly upsetting muscle with biceps even more grotesque than Griddle's, carrying his languishing adept like a rolled-up carpet. I gather this to be the Duchess Septimus. I don't see how she'll live out a week, since it seems the voyage here all but killed her. The Sixth Warden nearly had an apoplectic fit running to reach her, and had to be hauled along by his cavalier by the scruff of the neck. Whatever obscure operations they performed on her with vials and wires revived her enough that she was able to sit up and expel blood all down the front of his robes. Against all reasonable expectation, this made him ecstatic. I thought he would weep with joy.</p><p>Griddle had stopped to watch this bizarre exhibition along with everyone else. She bent over to pretend to adjust a fastening on her scabbard and whispered, "Kinky." At risk of belaboring the point for anyone left alive who may read this, I set down again the most persistent reality on all planets and in all climes: she is crass and a moron and I hate her.</p><p>Behind the shuttles came the <em> Cenotaph</em>. It is the Emperor's warship, with which He fights battles totally unknown to the trepid souls of the living. It is the arrow in His quiver which traverses the whole of the universe and never fails to slay its mark. It is the floating tomb in which we will spend the rest of our short lives, and then we will pass from it either into the River or into another kind of afterlife more glorious than any beyond our present imagining. It is a great round hulk of metal, with more in common at first glance with a saucer or orbital station than a ship, and its hull is frescoed with bones that are either constructs or were harvested from beasts larger than buildings, slain by the Emperor's unresting Hands.</p><p>By the time it had finished docking, all of us, the scions of the Houses and our cavaliers, had gathered in a huddle in the courtyard to watch in silence. Even Griddle was quiet, though her jaw was hanging open.</p><p>A hatch in the side of the ship, larger than the doors of Drearburh, retracted. A small white-haired person stepped out into the evening chill. He has the appearance of a birdlike old man, but if he was ever a natural-born human I'll eat my own tibia. He's not a revenant either, he's far too sprightly and coherent. The first thing he did was caper about halfway down the boarding ramp and cry, "Welcome! Hail to you all, beloved children of the Father who rescued us all from Death! Well-met, brightest jewels among his treasures! Glad I am to see you all have arrived without mishap -- well, without too much mishap," he amended, with a goggle and grin for the Seventh, who was then being supported by one of the Sixth pair on either side while her own cavalier frowned pulpily a pace behind. The old man said, "I am a keeper of the ways of the First House and a servant to the Necrolord Highest. Mine is the task of shepherding you to the best of my poor abilities on this great adventure you have undertaken. You must call me Teacher; not due to my own merits of learning, but because I stand in the stead of the merciful God Above Death, and I live in hope that one day you will come before him with the blood of his oldest enemy on your hands, and then you will call him Teacher, and Master, too, and then you will all be of the First!"</p><p>Like children huddled around a fire in the pit of deepest night, we had all drawn closer to the foot of the docking ramp. Griddle pressed closer to me than she ought, but if I moved away from her I would be forced closer to the Eighth, which would have been worse.</p><p>It was sepulchrally cold in the thin, manufactured atmosphere. The orbital heaters shifted to a lower setting, simulating night on an asteroid even farther from the Dominicus than the House of the Ninth. I heard a wind blowing through trees in that treeless place.</p><p>Teacher's voice dropped low with thrilling menace. He is an excellent orator. "All these long millenia, the Necrolord's holy Saints, his fists and gestures, have been slowly claimed by a vast and terrible death; not the trifling war against mere human terrorists, but the much greater one that Our Lord waged to bring us all back to life and has not stopped fighting for the space of one breath in ten thousand years. The Necrolord is hunted, to this day, by those ancient foes who would seek to devour us all to spite his loving heart. Know this: what you shall learn here are deep secrets, and they are not imparted to the faint or faithless. If you set foot on this ship, do so in the full knowledge that you have been chosen by God to hunt the most fearsome of all devils. You are indeed blessed, my children!"</p><p>Three heartbeats passed in silence. A small voice -- one of the Fourth children -- called out, "Where are we going?"</p><p>The man of the Fifth shushed them, but Teacher beamed. "Ah, the forthright Fourth -- the Fourthright! Ever to the heart of the matter. We go beyond life itself, young Sir Chatur. In this lies peril beyond imagining. Literally! It has never been tried before, and so I have no idea of the scope of the danger, except to say that it is surely vast. Yet the rewards are even greater. Those who acquit themselves well on this voyage will be offered the chance to ascend to Lyctorhood and bask eternally in the light of the King Undying."</p><p>The Third cavalier straightened his obnoxious jacket, preened his blindingly smug hair poof and demanded, "No more riddles. What the devil are these devils, anyway?"</p><p>"They are called Resurrection Beasts," the old man said somberly, "and more I cannot tell you without your sworn oath of secrecy and commitment, symbolized in your boarding this ship. Fetch your things! The tide that is beyond the grip of gravity soon turns, and we must be gone!"</p><p>Then he swept back up the boarding ramp like a drunken wading bird and disappeared.</p><p>The surface of the asteroid now is a bustle and blur. Cohort soldiers are embarking and disembarking by the legion, carrying things on and off the ship. The other heirs are scattered about, packing or waiting; the Third is having some kind of row in the common hall. Griddle came to fetch the trunks and then went back outside to stare at the ship some more. I do not know what she is thinking, this last hour before we depart. Probably that this will be her final escape, to far surpass all the attempts I strangled before they could be born.</p><p>God forgive me. I profane this holy crusade -- yet I must. I do it for my House, for His Ninth House and for what it guards. In the name of what He could not kill, I go forth to kill what He has condemned to death.</p><p>I do not anticipate any difficulty in that regard. I carry death with me as even these other necromancers cannot. I feel her hand on my shoulder now, her lips on my brow. I hear a cold wind where none exists. Soon we leave these shores, and we shall not soon return.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Crossing Over</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Third day - early morning</em>
</p><p>Aboard ship. I suspect there is grave dirt in the walls, or several hundred people have died on this ship, or both. The background thanergy is higher here, in space, than it was on Gadus.</p><p>After boarding last night Teacher told us that we would get answers in the morning, for some things could not be spoken within the demesne of Dominicus. Then he had each necromancer and cavalier escorted to separate quarters by a skeleton construct. The quarters are appropriately atmospheric; black-draped, low and wide and vaultlike. Not enough bones, but that's easily rectified. Nav took all the bedding off the cavalier cot and built herself a floor nest with it, where she curled up like an animal crawling into its hole and went to sleep. The change in atmosphere hasn’t improved her snoring.</p><p>The constructs are so nearly perfect that I cannot find a flaw. Beautifully reactive, impeccably articulated, without trailing spell-bindings or even any evidence of decalcification! The one who guided us let me examine it quite thoroughly, but I could not manipulate it. Something insulates it from my power, at least for now. The bones on the hull are likewise insulated. I spent the first few hours of our journey prying at them, but they would not respond to me. The osteoclastic matrix of both constructs and hull decorations is subtly different than dead human bone in a way I have not quite fully catalogued; but I will. I estimate two days before I am able to wrench control of these constructs from whoever is puppeting them now. Teacher, possibly, though he makes it hard to think so.</p><p>I tried theorems until I was sure Griddle was asleep, then slipped past her. Not that she would have noticed if a few tons of bone fell on her head. She would sleep through the Second Resurrection; but a head start is the only advantage one can claim by choice.</p><p>I was able to explore most of the ship, with the exception of the engine room and the Captain's quarters. At the entrance to each I was turned away by Cohort soldiers, who were appropriately deferential but also would not be moved without violence, which I thought too great a risk. The ship as a whole is shaped as a wheel, with 'spokes' radiating equally out in all direction from a central complex that includes the engine, as well as a large atrium with floor and walls the ash-gray of darkened marble in the nightcycle gloom. It seems to be filled with battered cafeteria tables and sickly plants. Also in the central complex is a library, and a suite that seems to belong to Teacher. I did not linger there.</p><p>Each spoke appears so far to be identical. The design is perfectly radial, which suggests a need for redundancy, or potential for an attack from any direction at any time. Closest to the center of the wheel are quarters, one for each House. The ninth spoke is the Captain's quarters. In addition to the polite Cohort guards posted outside, I sensed a glimmer of a thanergetic barrier in the darkened corridor. It did not feel like any ward I've encountered. Perhaps an entropy field? Unknown.</p><p>Further down each spoke are storage lockers filled with necromantic paraphernalia -- chalk, incense, teeth, vials of blood -- basic supplies. Also long poles or staves, possibly of use in cavalier training. Further past the storage lockers each spoke ends in an airlock. I was not able to open these. An airlock for each House suggests some task or trial to be performed in open space. All the more reason to gain control of those bones on the outer hull.</p><p>I did make a short survey of the other Houses' corridors. Each was the same configuration. The Second's quarters were dark; I assume they were fraternizing with Cohort personnel elsewhere on the ship. The Sixth's quarters, on the other hand, glowed like the halo of an engine fire. As I passed I heard the hiss of an autodoor and secreted myself in a niche, just in time to avoid being seen by the Sixth cavalier as she came down the corridor holding three steaming mugs.</p><p>The door to the Sixth quarters opened as she approached it. “Cam, there you are!” someone called from within -- certainly not the Master Warden. It was a teasing, lilting voice, without strength, but with the gripping, immediate warmth of a candle in a crypt. “We thought you’d fallen out an airlock!”</p><p>The Sixth cavalier paused in the doorway. “Would you two have noticed if I had?”</p><p>Over her shoulder I caught a glimpse of Sextus poised in an armchair, leaning intently forward with his fingers steepled and his spectacles pushed up to perch unsteadily in his hair, apparently interrupted in the midst of intense negotiations. Across from him, draped like an abandoned tapestry over another chair, was the pallid lady of the Seventh. </p><p>“Of course we would,” Sextus said indignantly.</p><p>Septimus wriggled in a completely undignified way until she could hook one foot behind the Sixth cavalier’s knee without having to sit up. “He’s right, you know, we’d have missed you dreadfully.”</p><p>“Don’t tell him he’s right, his head’ll swell so much it’ll throw off the grav engines." At that the Lady of the Seventh laughed, a bright and blood-flecked chortle that rattled the breath out of her. More laughter than the joke deserved.</p><p>The cavalier of the Seventh was nowhere in sight. When Sextus moved to stand, I saw that his hand was resting on Septimus's hand on the coverlet over her knees. Then his cavalier stepped inside and the door shut behind her. </p><p>I should have known the relationships between these other Houses would be profane and incestuous. I waited a while longer, but it was impossible to overhear whatever they might have been plotting, and none of them stirred out of the room again. Still, it’s valuable to have learned that the Sixth and Seventh are allies -- and more closely allied than I would have guessed. For Lady Septimus to let herself be alone and unguarded in their company suggests a much deeper level of involvement than I had anticipated between any Houses, except perhaps the Fifth and the Fourth.</p><p>Either that, or the Seventh's cavalier is appallingly negligent. But if the Seventh think the Sixth are harmless, they are fools.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> Evening </em>
</p><p>Shortly after the soft blue simulated dawn, a construct rapped on our door and led us to the atrium.</p><p>By false daylight the place is a noble masoleum, rich with decay; the marble is liver-spotted with great age, and the walls seem to have been transported whole from some ancient planetary ruin and carefully installed here in a skeleton of steel and plex. The slick modern cafeteria tables are nailed down with bolts older than Drearburh. The ceiling is an arch of plex, thick but astonishingly clear, that let us peer through to the pinpricks of distant, unnamed stars.</p><p>The construct seated us at a far corner table, where we were served gruel and tea. Nav gulped both down and burned her tongue so badly she kept having to make idiot faces and suck air in through her teeth. Tomorrow morning I will sew her hood shut.</p><p>The mood was apprehensive, but not uniformly so. The Third House seems ceaselessly insolent, and the paler twin had one of her feet up on the end of their table as she pretended to examine her nails. The Sixth continued to flock around the Seventh like a pair of pigeons quarreling over an orchid, and it must be said she looked a great deal more human this morning than last night. Her cavalier, left out of their many intense whispered conferences, was consoled by the taller Third twin, though what they talked about I cannot possibly imagine. The Fourth and the Fifth, as always, sat together, and the Eighth set themselves apart. We made a bizarre constellation across several tables, all ringed by servitor skeletons -- which were <em> infuriatingly </em>responsive. I must take one apart, if I have to get Griddle to wrestle one down. She might like that, actually. Perish the thought.</p><p>Teacher entered as most of us were finishing our meals. (Griddle indicated via signs that if I didn't want mine she would have it, then she proceeded to worsen her burns by sucking down another helping. At least now the expense of feeding her is the Emperor's.) Flanking Teacher were two more persons dressed as he was, in ceremonial white robes distinguished by gaudy particolored braided belts. This must be the uniform of the House of the First. One of Teacher's companions was taller and even more birdlike; the other was shorter, withered as a mummy, with a salt-and-pepper plait. Neither one spoke. I am not convinced that they <em> can </em>speak.</p><p>Teacher said, "Answers you were promised, and answers you shall have! You have come here in response to the summons of our Kindly Prince, our Lord and Master, who has called you to a task as mighty as it is terrifyingly simple. We are hunting a Resurrection Beast!"</p><p>It was as though a hatch had breached and blown all atmosphere from the room.</p><p>Teacher seemed delighted. "A fearsome name, eh? Not half so fearsome as the thing itself. Now, I am no necromancer, to explain matters of deep magic to you, the heirs of the Nine Houses! I have neither the wisdom of the Sixth, nor the erudition of the Fifth, nor even the long memory of the Ninth --" here he smiled at us, as though expecting a party favor "-- though indeed my memory is long. I can say only this: a Resurrection Beast has never before been slain by any hand but the Emperor's own Hands, his holy Lyctors. Yet over the millenia their numbers have been sadly diminished, so now the Emperor must turn to you, the honored heirs and guardians of His Houses, to see if you can accomplish with your mortal strength and cunning what has never been accomplished before. If you succeed, you will be offered the chance to ascend and become Lyctors yourselves. If you fail, you shall almost certainly die."</p><p>He paused brightly, as if waiting for questions, but this time none were forthcoming. He went on briskly: "Now, to practical matters. The ship is your own, with the exception of the Captain's quarters. In addition to your Teacher, I am your first mate, and I shall relay to you the wishes of the Captain, when necessary and prudent. The second and third mates," this apparently referring to his silent colleagues, "will speak to you, if they do speak, as with my voice. You are the rulers of your domains, and none but the Emperor may lawfully command you; know then that this all proceeds from His will, and heed the orders we shall give you as being proper and for the good of all. Certain duties must be shared among you, the chief of which is standing watch for our prey. When it is spotted, the watcher will ring the alarm; and then you will all proceed expeditiously to your boats, which will be launched in pursuit. What tactics and stratagems you use are entirely at your own discretion. The ship's library is yours to peruse. Your needs will be attended to when you are not on the hunt. We live as simple penitents do, but there is sufficient food for a journey of decades -- though of course we all wish and pray for a quick and indisputable success."</p><p>The necromancer of the Sixth raised his hand to about shoulder height. Teacher chirped, "Ah, Master Warden!"</p><p>"Are you saying," the Master Warden said slowly, "that this -- quest -- may take <em> decades</em>?"</p><p>"I do not know! The River is uncharted, even by the Kindly Prince our God! The Beast is vast, but in the infinite it may nevertheless be difficult to locate. If you have suggestions on how to better search out the droplet in the River, I will pass them on to the Captain." </p><p>“About that.” The brighter Third twin bent towards him with a remarkably compelling motion, golden and commanding. “When will we meet this mysterious Captain?”</p><p>“In time, in time! All things in their time, Princess!”</p><p>“Royalty dines at the Captain’s table.” That was the Third cavalier, seeming somehow to sulk even with perfect posture and perfect disinterested scorn. “Are you offering insult to the Princesses of Ida?”</p><p>Far from flinching at this clear threat, Teacher made a sound that I cannot avoid describing as a <em> giggle</em>. “Prince Tern, the Third of all Houses must know how perilous an invitation to dinner can be! Have patience.” Teacher looked around expectantly again, but no more comments were offered. "Well, let us get on with our business, then! We shall enter the River in about ten minutes, so I suggest you all find a window!"</p><p>With that he clapped his hands together gleefully and left.</p><p>"That's impossible," the Master Warden said aloud, apparently to no one. "This entire ship can't enter the River. Not physically. It'd break about six laws of metaphysics."</p><p>"Well I, for one, think that sounds like quite a show," the pale Third twin remarked, also apparently to no one. "Maybe we <em> had </em> better go and find a window."</p><p>I did not stay and listen to them bicker. I dragged Griddle out by her robe and commanded a passing servitor skeleton to take us to where the watches were kept. It led us what I estimated to be a quarter of the ship's circumference to a narrow ladder of iron, imposing and immoveable as any Ninth House monument. It was rough with patches of oxidation, but in odd patterns, as though it had had buckets of salt water slopped over it in the same places for years. I could not possibly imagine why anyone would do such a thing. I was trying to figure it out when Griddle said snidely, "I can carry you if you're scared."</p><p>"Choke and die," I told her -- or something to that effect -- and I climbed up first, thinking to at least hit her on the way down if the rungs gave way.</p><p>At the top of the ladder was a small domed chamber that looked as though it had been formed when a giant had blown a bubble in solid concrete. There was no window or opening in it at all. The only light came from an electric bulb, an ancient artifact of smudged glass with a single filament inside, that swung from a thin string at the dome's apex. It seemed an inefficient place for watching anything except concrete.</p><p>There was hardly room for Griddle to fit inside it. She sat at the lip of the ladder, dangling her feet down into the shaft we'd just climbed. "I think the skeleton's broken," she told me confidentially. "Or else it just hates you. Probably that."</p><p>Before I could begin even a cursory examination of the structure, it changed. I try to record in words a sensation that does not submit to straightforward description, and has certainly never been experienced by another living person, for anyone who plunged into the River without God's protecting power would die instantly. It was as though the weave of space itself was gripped in two preternatural hands and<em> twisted</em>. I felt the bones scrape together beneath my skin, and tasted bile; Nav made a hideous frothing yelp. The concrete dome was gone. I stood on a wooden platform the size of the black altar in Drearburh’s chapel, perched on a pole ten bodies high in the middle of a vast and dizzying emptiness. Wind hit me with a body's weight of sudden deceleration; at the same moment thanergy too intense to be believed obliterated my conception of time and space. In that moment, insensate, I must have stumbled. </p><p>Nav caught me. When I regained myself I was gasping and shuddering, half sprawled across her, with nothing but her grip on my robes stopping me from plummeting half the height of Drearburh to what would have been a messy death on the rough surface below us. </p><p>"Fuck, if you'd wanted to take a headfirst dive off a rickety piece of shit a million feet high we could have just stayed at home," she said, but her voice was shaking. "You saw that too, right? The ship's gone? Or have I finally just completely fucking lost it?"</p><p>Thanergy assailed me, crashing over me in waves totally unlike anything I had ever believed possible. Though it was insubstantial, I felt certain it was clogging my mouth like wet cotton, and clawed at my throat. For a hot throbbing moment I was sure I was either going to vomit spectacularly or faint, at which point Griddle would simply drop me over the side. It was like drowning, only to discover that I could breathe water; the knowledge that thanergy itself would not harm me did not assuage the body's grasping autonomic reflexes that sought to keep it afloat on a tide it could not possibly withstand.</p><p>"Shit," Griddle said, "Harrow, you're getting blood on my robes, and this one's the good black! Stop being morbidly weird for five fucking minutes and tell me what the <em> fuck </em> just happened!"</p><p>Slowly I regained a troubled equilibrium. The thanergy of the Ninth, where hundreds of thousands of faithful penitents had lived and died and been interred and raised again, was as a sputtering ember to the fission-star conflagration that now wrapped me like a cloak. Or as a corpuscle to a raging cancer. The swirl of thalergy in Griddle's muscle and bone, though repulsive, was at least familiar, and I used it as an anchor to return my senses to the scale of immediate experience. I told her to stop touching me, and she let me go abruptly -- but still without letting me tip over far enough to fall.</p><p>"The ship's not gone," I told her. "It's changed. We're in the River."</p><p>The comfortingly space-worthy <em> Cenotaph </em> was gone, as the concrete bubble we had been sealed in was gone. The open-topped platform we stood on now commanded a view in every direction: a view of blank, featureless sky, a flat unreal gray that seemed to betoken concealment, as though someone had slathered the real sky in greasepaint to hide its hue. Wind howled in my ears, barely louder than the banging of my own pulse. Our platform was atop a tall, improbably thin pole -- I was grateful to see that it still sported a ladder back down -- and the pole sprouted from the top of a ship, our ship, which was no longer a wheel but now a fat elongated missile in shape. It was made of metal, but a rougher and darker metal than before. It was still bedecked with bones, interwoven with irregular patches of plex of differing opacities, and what appeared to be dark wood.</p><p>The ship was afloat on the surface of the River. The water was gray, and writhed.</p><p>Figures congregated below us, milling aimlessly or struggling to get their bearings, at least one or two on their knees. Even from this height I could pick out the bulky cavaliers of the Seventh and Eighth, supporting their respective necromancers, and the bright Third twin trailing her anemic shadow.</p><p>The sturdy brown silhouettes of the Fifth hovered near the bottom of the ladder. In an impressively carrying voice the man boomed, "Ninth! Are you all right? Can you get down?"</p><p>"I think I can handle a ladder," I said, though of course he couldn't hear me.</p><p>"I dunno. If you could see yourself," Griddle started, but she trailed off to scramble down the ladder after me.</p><p>As we descended to the deck the roll and pitch of it caught me by surprise, and again I stumbled. This time it was the Fifth cavalier who dared touch me. He clutched at my arm, or tried to. “Apologies,” he said hastily. “No offense meant. Just take it easy, there. You’re all right?” he asked Griddle, who was looking a little greenish, actually.</p><p>He is a stocky man, whose fine clothes were immaculately buttoned and brushed despite the pale face and disheveled hair that showed he had not been unaffected by our sudden transition from life to afterlife. He was holding a tea tray on which were perched a cheerful blue kettle and a cluster of sturdy-handled mugs, as totally out of place in that miasma of the River as a snow leek would have been in the gardens of Rhodes.</p><p>"You would be the Reverend Daughter, I'm sure," he said, and bowed while still retaining the tray, which spoke more to his breeding than his clothes ever could. "Pardon the intrusion, but we haven't been introduced. Sir Magnus Quinn, at your service. I have here a tea that the spirit-summoners of the Fifth House often use to ease the shock of returning from the River -- my wife thought it might help. Would you care to try it?"</p><p>"I would not," I said, but Griddle had already taken a mug and was gulping it down just as she had the gruel at breakfast. As if she didn't realize how easy it would have been for the helpful Fifth to poison us and blame any ill effects on the journey!</p><p>The Fifth beamed at her. "That's the ticket. Of course my wife warned me that it would be jarring when we made the crossing, though I suppose there's really no preparing for it, is there?"</p><p>We were joined by a woman in matching clothes with a ceremonial circlet nestled firmly but not conspicuously into her well-domesticated curls. "No, there really isn't," she said to Quinn -- her <em> husband</em>? -- and bowed to me as courteously as he had. "An honor to meet you, Reverend Daughter."</p><p>"Ah yes, how remiss of me! This is the Reverend Daughter, er --" he paused, but when I gave him nothing but a cold stare, he recovered well. "And may I present Lady Abigail Pent of the Fifth House, my brilliant and beloved wife?"</p><p>After my experience watching the Sixth and Seventh I was less shocked than I might have been, but I saw no reason to keep censure out of my tone. "Your <em> wife</em>?”</p><p>"A bit of a departure from tradition, we know, but the marriage predates the cavalier appointment -- in fact, you might say I cavalier pri-<em> married</em>!"</p><p>He seemed very pleased with himself. Griddle choked on her tea, which might have been a laugh or the first symptom of a fatal poisoning. I rather hoped for the latter.</p><p>"On your own head be it," I said, as coldly as I could with my bones still hot with pulses of thanergy. "Come, Gr -- Gideon. We will retire."</p><p>Griddle followed me readily enough, which showed that she was still rattled, too. What had been the main corridor of the ship had become a deck with three gigantic poles jutting out of it, each studded at intervals with crosstrees, like the scaffolding of unfinished gallows for a condemned criminal thirty feet tall. Two of the poles were bare-topped; the third was decorated by the little platform we'd just descended from. The place where the watches were to be kept.</p><p>What exactly are we to be watching for?</p><p>I dared not look too closely at the surface of the River that roiled on every side. It was oily with half-glimpsed faces, and I did not wish to be distracted, nor waste time gazing and pointing as the others were. Instead I walked purposefully with Griddle trailing behind me until I found a hatch, about where the atrium had been. This opened to a sharp tug, and another ladder let us down into a dim, close corridor, and thence to the atrium, which had not been remade as drastically as the ship's exterior. It was still roughly round, still floored in senescent marble spotted and yellowed with the passing of millenia, still lit gloomily from above -- the arch above our head was now partly metal, but a sizable chunk of plex remained, so we could look out at that unreal sky. And so that anyone walking the deck above can glance down and see who lurks below.</p><p>We were alone. Griddle pulled her hood back and said, "It wouldn't kill you to not be a total bitch one hundred percent of the time. They were being <em> nice</em>."</p><p>"These people are not our friends. The sooner you learn that, the more likely we are to stay alive."</p><p>"How the hell would you know? You've never had a friend. And you're not getting any with that attitude."</p><p>I would have ended the discussion there, but she wasn't satisfied. "No one else's cavalier is following them around like a mummy with its tongue cut out. We're going to have to talk to someone eventually, or we are going to get our asses eaten and then handed back to us covered in toothmarks and monster spit. Have you heard anything Teacher’s said? You <em> personally </em> cannot <em> by yourself </em> kill a thing that swims around in a river of ghosts for fun, which means we're going to need allies, and as the one of us who's not ugly as shit and completely hateful, I could make that happen. Let me talk to them."</p><p>I said, "No."</p><p>"For fuck's sake, why not?" she demanded. "What good are your stupid ancient bone secrets after we're demon breakfast? Do you think when they send your little cut-up pieces to the Emperor in a box, he'll make your foot a Lyctor?"</p><p>Of course I didn't, and I told her so, but I dared not tell her the rest: how this is not a hunt, it is a war, and that allies are in a better position to destroy you than an enemy could ever hope. How close she had already come in Drearburh to learning the secret that would leave the other castaways no choice but to lay hands on me and toss me headfirst into the monster's maw. How one innocent comment from her on the circumstances of our upbringing might lead the renowned Lady Pent or cunning Master Warden to put together the pieces of the dreadful transgression of my existence.</p><p>So I said, "If you ever want to get the chance to be hacked to pieces on a Cohort battlefield, you will <em> do as I say</em>. I have no desire to die just because you are a <em> complete fucking moron </em> who cannot follow a simple instruction."</p><p>"Fine, yeah, fuck you too. I get it." She tugged her hood back up. "This isn't gonna work forever, you know."</p><p>"Your way out of your obligation is easy. Just let me fall next time."</p><p>She looked at me with a flicker of astonishment that quickly sunk back into surly stubbornness. "Good idea, your ghoulishness. Maybe I will."</p><p>She didn't say anything for the rest of the day, but trailed me like a sulking shadow as I re-explored the changed vessel. I tried to bask in the restful silence, but questions gnaw at me. Why <em> did </em> she catch me? She had no reason to. She's talked about pushing me off the top tier of Drearburh often enough, and while back on the Ninth she would have been immediately flayed and beheaded for my murder, here no one could blame her -- indeed, she would have been genuinely blameless.</p><p>It was instinct, I'm sure. Next time she won't give in to it. Yet what are my choices? Let her talk freely and enmesh us with the other Houses, so that they might find out that I am a cancer in the heart of our crusade, and in destroying me destroy the past and future of the Ninth? Or keep my cavalier's tongue chained, at least until she's frustrated enough to betray me to some kinder House? I see no way forward and no way out.</p><p>I prayed for hours in our rooms, yet I was not visited by my beloved specter. Perhaps she cannot follow me here.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Next chapter: WHALE FACTS.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Encounters</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Whale Facts Time!</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Gosh, I hope you guys like this fake stuff I made up. On that note, please forget (almost) everything the book told us about Resurrection Beasts and River physics, we're going off the rails.</p><p>I haven't had the brainpower to respond to each one individually, but thanks to every single person who has commented on this. Please know that your comments are cherished, and they are fueling me to keep this going. Heart eyes for all of you.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> Fourth day </em>
</p><p>Catalogued all the changes in the ship. The internal layout seems to be mostly preserved, and things have a sort of symbolic continuity of function. The kitchen is still clearly used for that purpose, though Teacher insists on now calling it a "galley". Our quarters are essentially unchanged. The airlocks at the end of each corridor have become open gaps in the hull, and outside each one is suspended a small boat, about two bodies long, sleek and pointed and apparently made of wood. Each has three sets of oars, and an appropriate House skull carved onto the front (what I have been informed is called the <em> prow</em>). They will make fine coffins when we have died in the pursuit they represent.</p><p>Teacher has also been changed. His face looks blurred, as though it were composed of an infinitude of reflections overlapping each other in some pane of grimy glass. His behavior has not altered whatsoever, and he remains, in Griddle's words, a <em> fucking comedian</em>.</p><p>The physicalities of our transformation pose some problems. For instance, the vessel we are now on clearly has less mass than the spacefaring <em> Cenotaph </em> we boarded at Gadus. The only logical conclusion is that physical laws do not apply; that what has happened is not the reforming of one physical ship into another physical ship, but the <em> translation </em> of our consciousnesses from the 'body' of the ship in life to its 'soul' in the afterlife. Clearly the two are linked, as the spirit of any creature is linked to its body, and they are just as clearly capable of operating at some distance, as a revenant or spirit-magician can operate independently of their corpse. It follows that the <em> Cenotaph </em> is still traveling through extrasolar space in the plane of the living, on its way to some unknown destination. This is supported by the fact that no human Cohort soldiers have followed us over; all the menial tasks here are done by skeletons. I do not know whether our bodies are still on the other ship, unconscious freight at the mercy of any passing asteroid. I bleed when cut; I feel pain and weariness; I seem to have retained all the trappings of a physical body. But that could easily be a projection of my spirit. If I am destroyed there, will I vanish here? If I am killed here, what will happen to my corpse there? If I knew more of spirit magic, I might be able to form a theory. As it is I am left with less than nothing.</p><p>Griddle is avoiding me, but as far as I can determine she hasn't spoken to any of the other Houses, either. Though if she had, it would not be hard to keep the conspiracy silent.</p><p> </p><p>
  <em> Fifth day </em>
</p><p>Spent yesterday and today in the ship's library. I knew that Cohort ships had libraries for the use of the necromancers aboard, but I thought they were meant to be organized, antiseptic places. Perhaps it was so in the living realm. In the River, the <em> Cenotaph's </em> library is a dank, grungy, wood-paneled bolt-hole, fulminant with stacks of tomes less withered but more well-travelled than anything on the Ninth. Pale moons of fungus dot some of the pages, as the place is continually damp with an up-welling of salt sea between the floorboards. It makes no logical sense for the waters to reach this room, but clearly logic here is subordinate to other considerations.</p><p>There are only a hundred or so books, and they were clearly curated for this voyage, though "curated" may be too strong a word. Someone rifled through the index of a much larger library and threw all the books that touched on Resurrection Beasts into this pit, without regard to date, author, or genre. The most useful ones I have found only approach relevance for a few dozen pages. I have started compiling my own treatise on the subject, the salient points of which I will record here:</p><p> </p><p>RESURRECTION BEASTS seem to be a type of revenant, specifically a multiple or compound revenant. The traditional hungry ghost is comprised of a single murdered soul; two million murdered souls coalesce into a font of hatred and ravenousness bigger than some stars. <strike>(And two hundred into a ransom for the end of the world.)</strike></p><p>All Resurrection Beasts are chimeral in another way. Each starts as a 'brain' or nucleus in the River, which over time exerts enough influence on the solid universe to collect itself a 'body' of detritus, which may then develop other properties.</p><p>There is a disappointing lack of consistency in most texts, and the term seems to be used to inspire horror rather than to describe specific necromantic phenomena. As no one else seems to have taken the time to do it, I have divided Resurrection Beasts into types based on size and origin. I have no doubt that this will be but an incomplete sketch of the phyla of nightmares, but those who come after me may complete the work when my bones are dust -- which may be later this week.</p><p> </p><p>COMETARY/UNTETHERED BEASTS</p><p>The smallest observed form of cosmic revenant. Possibly the first stage in the life cycle of the larger beasts -- an egg from which will hatch vengeance and utter ruin. At this point the beast is mostly nucleus and mostly in the River. I am calling it cometary due to the trail of malignant thanergy that follows its body, which is sometimes no bigger than a speck of dust, as it wanders through space. Reports of whole ships gone temporarily mad with terror and bloodlust suggest that this aura can poison the minds of the living.</p><p>No records exist of these beasts being hunted or slain. It seems they are too elusive to be easily tracked.</p><p> </p><p>LUNAR BEASTS</p><p>Comparable in bodily size to a mid-range moon. At this point the beast's shell is described as being made of 'debris'. Its character is described as 'very savage'. One is forced to imagine a near-sentient monstrous garbage pile roaming the universe in search of blood and viscera. Its natural habitat is the orbit of a thalergetic planet, which it sucks dry like a leech, instantly killing every living thing that lies in the path of its shadow and devouring the thanergy released to swell its River corpuscle. The surviving denizens of one such planet described it as having 'tusks and a thousand screaming eyes'. I do not want to know how eyes can scream.</p><p>The abovementioned planet was spared total annihilation by a Cohort warship which collided with the lunar beast and wounded it, to the point where it was knocked out of orbit (or limped away to lick its wounds). Their corporeal forms can be wounded, then.</p><p>In the margins of that account, an unknown person has written in a scrawling hand: <em> remember that? M caught that asshole in the mesorhoic and A cooked him &amp; we ate him. Fucking delicious</em>.</p><p>To which another, looser hand replied: <em> not as delicious as you :p </em></p><p>I cannot even begin to guess at the meaning of these inscriptions. However I must note for completeness that they are accompanied by a quite impressive sketch of a naked man holding a fishing pole carefully positioned to cover his genitalia, and a woman taking a bite out of an equally carefully positioned… something. Possibly some kind of steak. Or a melon? Unclear, and frankly I do not want to know.</p><p> </p><p>LUNAR BEASTS (WAXING)</p><p>When a lunar-scale Resurrection Beast has totally drained a thalergetic planet, it seems to go through a chrysalis phase in which it sheds pieces of its corporeal shell, which fall from orbit. Usually this is enough to break loose sizeable pieces of crust and mantle from the planet below, if not to shatter it completely; the beast then uses the fragments of the planet to build itself a new shell. This suggests a timeframe in which it is shell-less, and therefore vulnerable to attack. However, it appears the River corpuscle grows vast and terrible during this phase.</p><p>After a full day's cross-referencing, I have finally determined that "mesorhoic" is a label given to a layer of depth in the River. The above note, and our present journey, would therefore indicate that the River corpuscle is the most easily destroyed part of the beast (and, weirdly, edible -- spirit parasitism?). But in the waxing phase an attack from the River becomes untenable as the beast develops into a more fierce planetary form, which may appear as a "deathless city", "grim angel", "fucking hentai* bullshit", or "vast scintillating corpse of your first love", or all at once, depending on which report you believe.</p><p>*definition unknown. Possibly a corruption of a pre-Resurrection word since lost to history.</p><p> </p><p>LUNAR BEASTS (WANING)</p><p>Likewise, a lunar-scale beast that fails to find enough prey to sustain itself will begin to collapse inward, increasing in density like a dying star. This does not seem to weaken it, but at this point something valuable is produced inside its body -- its River nucleus, not its corporeal body. What exactly this substance is I have not been able to determine, but it seems to be organomineral in nature, and is described in several places as being necessary to "the process". A reference to Lyctoral ascension?</p><p> </p><p>PLANETARY BEASTS</p><p>The vengeful souls of murdered planets. Based on the limited resources I have here, this seems to be the largest and most destructive form of beast ever encountered -- or at least recorded. Its physical body is many times larger than the planet which spawned it, and it seems to be able to spawn corporeal creatures of its own, called "Heralds", of which I can find no clear description. The accounts of its River nucleus are likewise complete nonsense. The only piece of information that seems useful is repeated warnings that looking directly at it will cause madness, and possibly death by brain hemorrhage. Other descriptors include "RIGHT BASTARD", "absolute cocksucker ruined my week" and "<span class="u">KILL IT</span>". Not a foe to be trifled with. But they have been killed -- and what these authors have done, I can do. I just need to figure out how.</p><p>(The authors of at least some of these books must have been Lyctors. It is impossible that they weren't. But if that's true it would make three-quarters of their writings blasphemy, and the rest heresy. It almost gives me hope -- that He will allow one more blasphemous creation to walk in His shadow. Despite all that I am. Despite all I have done.)</p><p> </p><p>STELLAR BEASTS</p><p>No such creature has ever been recorded, but the model demands they be at least theoretically possible. If the ghost of a murdered planet can lay galaxies to waste, what of the ghost of a murdered sun? If the Lord Over the River were ever to shrug off the burden of keeping Dominicus burning, would it come for us with unfathomable teeth? <strike>I dreamed of it last night, and the familiar cleansing amber of its flames.</strike></p><p> </p><p>MISCELLANIA</p><ul>
<li>“Its footprint in the stars” -- the corporeal forms of Beasts have gravity. Enough to disturb the orbits of entire systems? Enough to deform constellations as seen from the surface of inhabited planets?<br/><br/>
</li>
<li>Are the Beasts intelligent? Can we doubt that they are? Revenants can be bargained with, can answer questions and pursue the passions of their former lives. It follows that Resurrection Beasts are not mindless, but carry out the passions of a planet -- the foremost goal of all revenants being to punish their murderers. Can this be used against them?</li>
<li>Multiple accounts -- but not all -- mention cavaliers being the ones to strike the killing blow to the smaller beasts. It seems to me likely that the post of cavalier was first developed for this reason, to fight this foe. If so, the post should be done away with. It is antiquated and useless. If there is a monster to be slain I will certainly not put the task in Griddle's hands. I cannot find any accounts of cavaliers who survived, and I will not risk</li>
</ul><p> </p><p>
  <em> Fifth day - evening </em>
</p><p>My earlier research was interrupted by voices. I barely had time to conceal my books and myself before my sanctuary was invaded by the Third House.</p><p>The pale twin came first, through a door I had not noticed and had therefore neglected to ward; I would have been caught entirely unawares if the bright twin had not been arguing with their sulky cavalier. As it was I secreted myself behind a bookshelf, so all I could see was the guttering light of the candles paint buttery streaks into the pale twin's oleaginous hanks of hair. </p><p>(There is no electric light here, yet candles seem oddly harmless and never seem to catch the ship on fire. More metaphorical causality.)</p><p>"It's all a conspiracy anyway," the cavalier was saying, trailing in with the bright twin on his arm in a manner that suggested she'd been tugging him along like a reluctant child to some shared game. "First this buffoonery with the ship, then making us eat with the commoners, giving us that awful ration stuff --"</p><p>The commanding twin, exasperated, tweaked his ear. "Oh, do quit whining, Babs! It's a marvelous adventure if you'd shut up and try to enjoy it. Right, Ianthe?"</p><p>"Oh yes," the pale twin drawled, though her attention seemed to be mostly taken up with the first stack of books she'd found -- a set of personal diaries of an ancient Cohort general that I had already determined were totally worthless. With one of these in her hand she said, "Listen to her, Babs, and if you're very good you may even get to kill something. I know how you enjoy the suffering of dumb animals."</p><p>"What's that supposed to mean?" the cavalier demanded, but without much heat in it. He seems utterly subservient to his adepts, as though they might turn and sink their fangs into him at the slightest provocation.</p><p>The bright twin said, "Ianthe, don't be obnoxious."</p><p>"Why not? I'm so good at it." She turned, book idly open and dangling from her hand like an avulsed flap of flesh not quite severed, and scanned the stacks. I was safe out of sight in a deep crevice between the shelves, and the agonized creaks and groans of the ship should have hidden the sounds of my heart and breath, but the candle I had been reading by still stood on a low shelf. I held my breath as she approached it, fearful that a current of air might give away my position. Her eyes were the purple of a new bruise.</p><p>She said, "You'd like to kill something too, wouldn't you dear?"</p><p>My heart froze as though it had been dropped into the waters beyond the stone. She could not have seen me -- I was black-robed in deep shadow -- but she was looking straight in my direction, though the candle would have blinded her at that range. She didn't see me. She couldn't have.</p><p>She turned back to her sister and said, "Come on now, admit it. Don't try to be humble, your tiny brain can't handle the strain. You'd <em> love </em> to slay a monster."</p><p>"Of course I would. That's what we're here for," the taller twin said stiffly, as though stung.</p><p>Ianthe shrugged. "That's what they <em> say </em> we're here for."</p><p>The cavalier seized on this scrap like a kicked dog. "See? It's a conspiracy. I have half a mind to write to your father and complain --"</p><p>They moved off, with the taller twin saying "Oh don't be stupid, how are you going to <em> write </em> from here --"</p><p>The pale twin looked back again, not a pointed glance but one that raked the whole shrouded darkness of the stacks as though with claws, seeking to lay it open and pry into what lay beneath. But her sister called her name, imperiously, and at last she blew out the candle and went.</p><p>That would have been bad enough, but after I fled the library, I was to discover that no sanctum remained inviolate. Our quarters also had been invaded and ransacked. Griddle had shoved our trunks against the wall of the outer chamber to form a sort of settee, and had draped the whole thing with the contents of her bed-nest. Lounging on this grim couch, like the first maggot to turn up unwelcome in a corpse, was Dulcinea Septimus.</p><p>I have not described her thoroughly before, as I did not think she merited such description. Obviously, finding her in my heavily-warded chambers changed that, so I take the time now: she is wasted by obvious illness, with skin so near translucency that her veins are visible beneath at her wrists and elbows, tangles of blue-green like the vines of the famous arboreta at Rhodes. She likely once had the rose-red lips of her House, or some similar sort of romantic nonsense, but no longer. In fact she looked rather weak and feeble, propped up on black cushions, the symmetry of her features unbalanced by a tube of cartilage (obviously a construct) trailing out of her left nostril and vanishing below the neckline of her teal dress, which was simpler and more frothy than her previous garments. Her hair is short, an unimpressive light brown, her eyes an unremarkable dull blue.</p><p>Griddle, sitting on another trunk, was pale under her paint, her shoulders bent in a guilty hunch, and she leaped to her feet when she saw me enter.</p><p>Before I could castigate either of them, or even raise a construct to throw them out, Septimus rose herself. It was a slow motion and not entirely steady, but graceful in its way, as though she moved underwater. In the same warm, half-choked voice I had heard outside the quarters of the Sixth, she said, "Honored Reverend Daughter, my deepest apologies for this intrusion. I throw myself upon the mercy of the venerable Ninth House and request the privilege of a formal audience."</p><p>Her formality was pitch-perfect; she was well-studied. I said, "Your request for an audience is denied. Get out of my rooms."</p><p>A faint smile hovered about her mouth, like a moth fluttering about a lamp. "On my word as the Duchess of Rhodes, it will only take a moment of your time. And I'm very persistent; if you send me away I'll only crop up again. Like a bad fungus. Half my -- ah -- <em> courtiers </em> back home would tell you that, if you asked them while I wasn't around."</p><p>I replied, "Persistence is not a virtue in fungus or intruders." </p><p>Then, rather than dignify her nonsense with sustained attention, I focused on glaring at Nav in a way that conveyed <em> I will flay you alive for bringing this nuisance into the only place of safety we can hope to claim, and I will flay you again if you do not remove her immediately</em>. This did not motivate my cavalier to spring into action in defense of my person, but it did earn a one-finger salute.</p><p>"Please don't be angry at Gideon," Septimus protested. "As I said, I'm very persistent. She's been perfectly penitent and hasn't broken her vow once, but I just pestered her until she couldn't put me off any longer. You see, I wanted to meet you."</p><p>She was starting to wobble a little bit, clearly not used to standing upright for so long. With a slight apologetic quirk of her lips she began to lower herself down again. Nav sprang to help her with a cringing servility that made me ill. But that was a problem for later. I said, "Why would you want to meet me? If you're looking for last rites, you'd be better off seeking absolution from the Eighth House."</p><p>At that she smiled for real, an almost conspiratorial grin. Her teeth were stained very faintly pink with old blood. To my surprise, the smile was not entirely gentle. "Well said, you're probably right. Unfortunately, Master Octakiseron is genuinely awful. But I think you and I could be friends."</p><p>Astonished, I could not help but look at Nav, who made a faint motion of her shoulders that said <em> I know, beats the hell out of me too</em>.</p><p>I told her, "I have it on very good authority that I neither have any friends nor am capable of making them. You have satisfied your curiousity and I have satisfied your request for an audience. Now leave."</p><p>She did not leave. Instead she looked at me.</p><p>Few people look directly at me for any length of time, not in the way she did, with a disquietingly imprudent attempt at intimacy. None of the penitents of Drearburh would have dared <em> inspect </em> me. Aiglamene averts her eyes in my presence, as is proper, and Ortus would probably rather recount a list of his sins to his dead father's ghost than match my gaze. Crux sometimes used to meet my eyes, though less often in recent years. Only Griddle looks me full in the face, taking pride in her insolence.</p><p>Septimus was not prideful. Her gaze was open and direct, perhaps thoughtful, perhaps very slightly sad. She said, "I don't think that's true, that you can't have friends. Being lied to for most of my life has made me a rather good judge of character."</p><p>"You know nothing of my character," I snapped, tiring of this game. "And you have greatly misjudged it if you think I won't strike a woman who is ill."</p><p>She said, "I don't think I have, actually. You see, I know what it's like to have been alone in the dark for a long time, and in quite a lot of pain."</p><p>I had nothing to say to that. At last she stood, and placed her own hand on Nav's that hovered anxiously near her shoulder, ready to catch her if she stumbled. "I do mean it, Reverend Daughter. If your policy on making friends ever changes, come and find me -- assuming I'm still kicking. And don't be hard on Gideon."</p><p>She walked out under her own power. "<em>Gideon" </em> trailed her like an anxious puppy until she was in the corridor, then turned to face me with her chin jutting out and her shoulders squared for a fight.</p><p>We did fight, though it was so tedious it hardly bears recording.</p><p>What is Septimus planning? What advantage could she be hoping for by seeking an audience with me? If her plan is to turn Nav against me, why show her hand like this? Is she attempting to add me to her harem along with the Sixth House? She certainly fluttered her eyelashes at me enough, and I can only imagine what she's offered to my "cavalier".</p><p>After our shouting match, Nav left, and slammed the door to our quarters behind her. I imagined with some regret that I would never see her again. Yet she came back, sometime in the hours past midnight. She's curled up in her reconstructed nest in the next room. I reinforced the bone wards on the door and added blood wards, but that will not hold an external enemy for long, not if they have help from inside. Where did she go? To seek asylum from another House? But then why return -- and why, in that case, would she have brought Septimus here and alerted me? Why not just defect and be done with it? </p><p>I don't understand her. I don't understand any of these people.</p><p>I must place my hope in the research I've done, as I certainly see none in any other quarter. And I cannot accept what I begin to fear: that somehow, inevitably, I have already failed.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Next chapter: THAR SHE BLOWS </p><p>(that's what she said)</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Blood and Water</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>THAR SHE BLOWS</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This chapter is twice as long as the other ones and also I love it twice as much. Thank you again to every single person who has encouraged and enabled me, you are all beautiful.</p><p>Some body horror and hallucinations in this one. Mind the updated tags!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> Sixth day - first hunt </em>
</p><p>I have not taken the time to explain the mast-head watches. The pole on top of which Griddle and I endured the River crossing is called the foremast, and the platform atop it the mast-head. (Griddle has taken every opportunity to make crass jokes about this, which I will not dignify by recording.) Each day is divided up into shifts, called "bells", and each shift is given to a cavalier, who climbs the iron ladder and perches on the mast-head while scanning the horizon for any glimpse of a beast in the surrounding waters.</p><p>When the Sixth asked what she was meant to be looking for, Teacher replied with the typically helpful, "Oh, strange sights as thou art born to, things invisible to see! Spouts and phenomena! I have no doubt you will recognize them, Warden's Hand!" </p><p>If anything in that vague category shows itself, the cavalier on duty is to ring a bell hung on a rope at the side of the platform. Until today, that bell had been silent, its tongue stilled.</p><p>With the library technically open to all and our quarters no longer a safe haven, I found an empty storage locker on the ship's lowest deck, a musty dimness where no one but skeletons has ventured, and I have converted it into a space for study and contemplation. The most useful books of the library are secreted there, safe from prying eyes. I was renewing the bone wards on the doors, in preparation to return to our quarters, when I was interrupted by an unbelievable racket. It was not unlike the time Griddle got into the bell tower when she was twelve, and made such a mess with the Secundarius bell that three nonagenarian parishioners died of coronaries, the glazing in the chapel cracked, and Griddle herself was deafened for a week. It almost made me miss home.</p><p>The Eighth cavalier had sounded the alarm. As I came on deck he was descending hand over hand, moving down the ladder swiftly for a man of his bulk. He touched lightly down and was mobbed by the other Houses, full of questions. What had he seen, where, how did he know --</p><p>He pointed ahead of the ship and to the left, saying only, "Great big spout. It didn't look natural."</p><p>"Nothing about this is natural," his adept sneered.</p><p>The alarm had thrown the skeletons into an accelerated rhythm, too mechanical to be called a fervor. They rushed about the deck doing things with ropes and swinging wooden spars around. One of them raced to a huge wooden upright wheel and gave it a heaving spin. I stared at that skeleton for several seconds before I realized why it had caught my attention: it had a scrap of black cloth tied over one of its ocular sockets. The cloth had a white smudge on it. I was at least halfway down the deck, but I became convinced that the smudge was a jawless skull drawn over black cloth in white greasepaint.</p><p>Before I could investigate, Teacher was among us like an uninvited ghost at a funeral. "How exciting! To your boats, quickly! Cavaliers, mind your adepts! Hard to starboard!"</p><p>A procession of skeletons swept us belowdecks, ushering each House to the little boat that waited, hanging like a ready noose, at the end of its designated corridor. Somewhere in the crush Nav was shoved towards me, looming suddenly out of a wall of dry bone. She looked -- hungry, almost feral with anticipation. Her grin was mocking and irreverent, as usual, but still a marked change from the heavy sulkiness of the last few days. It was a relief.</p><p>Six skeletons raced down the corridor ahead of us and leaped neatly into our boat, poising themselves at the oars, radii and ulnae cocked like pistons. The boat swung with the motion of the ship. The image of it stands out stark in my memory, looking both incredibly fragile and surprisingly sturdy: like a lone rib, an unsupported curve charged with protection of the vital heart.</p><p>Splashes and cries resounded distantly from the River outside. Twelve tiny red pinpricks in fleshless skulls turned towards us.</p><p>We had both paused at the same moment. "Nav. This is serious," I said. "What we are doing is unspeakably dangerous. I will need <em> obedience </em> out there. Immediate and unthinking devotion, or we will almost certainly both be killed." It was in my throat, oozing up between my teeth to tell her about the cavaliers from the library records, who had performed superbly in fights against similar monsters and never returned. But my tongue stayed locked.</p><p>Griddle looked at me. She was wearing her stupid smoked glasses. "Yeah, I got it. Kiss your ass like it’s my one true love in a coma. Lucky for you, ‘not getting mega-murdered’ is my middle name.” She paused. “Ready to get wrecked, night admiral?"</p><p>"More ready than you are," I said stiffly.</p><p>"Last one in's a rotten tooth," she said, "one of Crux's really gross ones, you know, that's all yellowy," and then she vaulted smoothly into the boat. This forced me to wait for it to stop bobbing before I tried to climb in myself, lest I fall through the gap between it and the side of the ship. Finally I had to use a pinch of bone dust to form a sort of makeshift stepladder, then another to form vertebrae to throw at Nav until she stopped laughing.</p><p>With the suddenness of a haptic nightmare jerk, the ropes that kept us suspended were cut, and we dropped like a stone. River water splashed up around us, noxious and haunted. The skeletons began hauling on the oars immediately, in perfect clockwork unison, so that while Nav and I rolled and staggered, trying to find our footing, the boat shot out of the shadow of the <em> Cenotaph</em>, loosed like a stone from a slingshot onto the open plain of the River.</p><p>The other boats spread out on either side of us, a staggered flock, the furthest ones half-obscured by the tumult of waters. Nearest on our left was the Third House; their boat was in turmoil inside as well as out, until the Crown Princess succeeded in tossing one of the  skeleton rowers overboard and took its place. To my astonishment she kept pace with them easily, pulling with the advantage of muscle over unsupported bone, her whole body a leonine arch of violet and gold, her hair blown back like a handful of molten platinum. Beside that lithe performance, her sister and her cavalier seemed to be only another two skeletons, dead or dying weight.  On our right, within shouting distance, the Sixth cavalier knelt with her knee braced in the front of their boat, leaning forward keen-eyed into the wind, while her adept sat folded like a collapsible chair in the back, clinging grimly to the sides and keeping his head down, one hand clutched to his spectacles.</p><p>Our boat leaped and bucked like a living thing. It was hardly wider than a coffin, and the oar-handles and skeletal limbs made the center a whirl of force and motion that could easily knock either one of us into the River. Low moans rose beneath the creak and splash of our motion: moans of waste and hunger, the chorus of a billion billion undead watery throats.</p><p>A wave sent me staggering forward as the haft of an oar swung back and cracked against my hip. Griddle tried to steady me, but I evaded her and made my way to the front of the boat. There, where the jawless skull jutted out over humanity's dead, I tried to catch sight of our enemy.</p><p>Like an island in that unbroken waste, a shimmering prismatic mass rose ahead of us. It was a molten bubble of iridescent colors, a solid tumor built from the nauseating rainbows reflected in a pool of engine oil. It swelled and burgeoned and split, becoming two halves of the wing-case of a gigantic beetle, bigger than the <em> Cenotaph</em>, with glass mandibles dripping with bile.</p><p>It said <em> we meet again, my sweet baby. </em>It spoke in my mother's voice. I haven't heard my mother's voice in seven years.</p><p>"STOP SCREAMING!" Nav bellowed. Her hands were around my throat, clenched and tightening. I thrashed and clawed and poured thanergy into every bit of bone I could reach -- earrings, bracelets, corselet all exploded outward in a burst that should have skewered each of her organs individually. The grip on my throat did not ease. The hands that caved in my windpipe and grated my spinal column against itself were callused, rough as the homespun rope of Drearburh. That grip squeezed me with the inexorable weight of the stone before the Tomb. It crushed the air from my lungs and flattened them like paper sacs, crushed me as I screamed without sound, as I sobbed and wept, and as the rock rolled over me cold hands streaked grime across my cheeks in the familiar shapes of the Mask of Death Triumphant, and my mother's voice said <em> shhh, darling, sleep now</em>.</p><p>I remember that very clearly. My mother never called me "darling" when she was alive.</p><p>After that my memory blurs. I remember the beetle became the jawless skull, laughing at me, taunting me with the nine thousand secret names of God, and the nine thousand sins by which I profaned each one. I remember looking down at my own hands and seeing them covered in pustules that burst and released clouds of spores. I remember my Beloved's dead face reflected in dark glass.</p><p>I came back to my tattered senses curled up in the bottom of the boat, mired in a half-inch of River water that stank of ammonia and preservative. Bone lay scattered over me like funeral ash, in chips and fragments. I clutched a distal chunk of rib and spat out thick blood.</p><p>"Nonagesimus! If you're done wigging the <em> fuck </em>out, I could use a hand over here!"</p><p>I wiped clotting blood from my eyes and looked up. Nav had unsheathed her rapier and was swinging wildly at a hunched, dripping shape that was trying to claw its way up over the side of our boat. We were no longer moving, but I had not noticed at first because we still rocked from side to side as revenants scrabbled at the hull from underneath with deliquescing limbs and blind desire.</p><p>The water already in the boat curdled into hands that grasped and sucked at my ankles. I waited for the strangling suffocation to return; when it didn't, I swung the bit of rib I held, pouring thanergy into a blooming burst of growth, awakening dead osteoclasts until I wielded a three-foot-long spar. The undead wrists that groped for me splattered into formless, oozing malice.</p><p>Nav had speared her foe through one eye, then yelped and danced back as it flowed up and around the blade, reaching for her, the stinking cavern of its jaws agape. Bone crunched under her boots; the remains of our skeletal rowers, who lay crumbled, some crushed, some exploded by my shrapnel burst of panic. Without thinking I twisted and swung the rib I held back in the other direction. It whacked Nav in the thigh, but caved in half the ghoul's chest. The impact vibrated into my wrists and I dropped it, gasping.</p><p>More ghouls were rising, clawing their way over the sides, hissing in voices without breath, splattering water like oil. Nav ducked one that groped for her, too slow. It dragged a hand down her arm. She staggered, choking on a scream, as her flesh began to smoke.</p><p>I was behind her, half-upright. I could have shoved her in the small of the back and sent her into the arms of the River's dead. In my mind, she had just tried and failed to throttle me. All our lives we had mauled each other, tried to tear each other apart, and here we were alone on the fog-shrouded waters of the River. If I was to perish here, I could at least claim the last victory and not let it be by her doing.</p><p>I wish I could say it was reasoned consideration that stayed my hand, but it was something much deeper, an animal instinct: the need of the living to band together against the dead.</p><p>Nav was laying about her with a femur. She was already burned in two other places; her shoulder, her wrist. She shouted, "Okay! Metal bad, bone good! Harrow, I need a sword!"</p><p>Another jumble of fingers and pseuopoda slid up through the cracks in the bottom of the boat. This time one of them clutched my bare ankle, and I did scream; their touch was searing acid. But bone surrounded me, shattered by my lashing out in the grip of delirium, released from the power that had animated and insulated it. I pulled on the half-destroyed skeletons around us. They collapsed to powder and reformed. Thanergy was essentially infinite. I built a lattice network like a trellis, with a wicked spike at every interstice, that sliced the revenants to pieces and settled like a shell over the boat, so we were encased under a canopy of crisscrossing calcified razor wire. As an afterthought, I mashed a half dozen ribs together into a spear, longer than Nav was tall, with a curve at the end like a skinning knife.</p><p>"That is not what a sword looks like and you know it!" she said, but she snatched it from me and began jabbing it through the gaps in my fretwork, skewering the revenants still trying to board. They were multiplying, drawn to a defenseless target. Already they were climbing over each other, poorly differentiated, eyes just shallow depressions in watery faces. Soon they would form a wave high enough to sink us --</p><p>"Harrow, for fuck's sake, get us out of here!"</p><p>Of course. I couldn't reconstruct the rowers, but I could build new ones. I sprung four skeletons from a handful of phalanges. They leaped to the oars, and with a stroke we were flying again, cutting through the surf too fast for anything to follow.</p><p>Nav collapsed like an abandoned construct, slumping against our bone canopy to stare at me. One lens of her glasses was cracked and she was pale under her paint. "Okay, sanity check. Do you know who I am?"</p><p>"I wish I didn't," I grumbled. I felt like a rag that had been dipped in blood and formaldehyde, set briefly on fire, and wrung out again. Things I could not name still moved unsettlingly behind my eyes.</p><p>"Do you know who <em> you </em> are?"</p><p>"The past and future of the Ninth House, last guardian of the Tomb that must remain forever locked --" It was possible that I was slightly delirious.</p><p>"That's close enough. Next question, and I hate to feel like I'm repeating myself here, but: <em> what the goddamn fuck was that</em>?"</p><p>"You mean the part where you tried to kill me? I can't say I haven't been expecting it, but really, Griddle, that was moronically unsubtle, even for you --"</p><p>"What? No! What the fuck? I didn't try to kill you, <em> you </em> tried to kill you. I tried to keep you from ripping your own head off, which, you're welcome, by the way. Although honestly at this point I'm wondering why I even bother." She stared at me with wide eyes, one black and hidden behind its lens, the other gold and astonished and -- something almost like betrayed. "Harrow, do you think I've been trying to kill you?"</p><p>"Why wouldn't you?" I said stiffly. "My death wins you everything you ever wanted, and it would be easy."</p><p>“One, I like my spleen and I don’t want a bone in it. Two, the Cohort uses oathbreakers and House traitors for target practice -- manacled, underwater target practice. Three, unlike you, I'm not a <em> colossal fucking dickwad</em>!" she burst out. "I've done everything you asked! I've done things you haven't even asked me to do --"</p><p>"Like bend the knee to Septimus," I sneered, for I felt this was an oathbreaking offense worth mentioning, but Griddle ignored it completely.</p><p>"-- and so far all I'm getting out of this deal is bullshit paranoia and ghostly freezerburn! What will it take to get your head out of your mummified ass for five seconds and make you get that we have to do this <em> together</em>?"</p><p>"Sentimentality? From you, Griddle? I can't say I'm surprised --"</p><p>"Will you cut the <em> horseshit</em>," she said, with more venom than I could remember hearing from her in a long time. "Look, I know you're scared because they didn't just throw you in a room with a bunch of moldy old books and let you play 'who's the best necromancer' until everyone but you passed out in a pool of blood sweat and died, all right? I know that's what you wanted. And I know you fucking hate me, and it's mutual, believe me. If you'd died back home in some kind of bone accident I'd have laughed my ass off all the way to Trentham. But you fucking brought me here, and I'm here now, and if I'm going to be your cav then at least <em> let me do what you wanted me to do </em>! The other Houses think you're a neurotic with leprosy and I'm a mutant --"</p><p>"You are a mutant," I retorted automatically.</p><p>"And you're a neurotic with heart leprosy," she parried. "But I'm not gonna waste my time and sink my rep killing you when the monster'll do it for free. I want out of this as bad as you do. <em> Stop acting like I can't do shit</em>."</p><p>"I seem to recall the only service you ever offering to perform for me was to spot me as I backflipped off the top tier of Drearburh."</p><p>"Yeah, because you fucking deserved it!"</p><p>She had a point: I was forced to admit it even to myself. There have been so many things between us over our lives, but never trust, and never truce. But continuing to waste our energy and ire on each other would be counterproductive, with such a monumental task before us.</p><p>At the look on her face -- righteous, demanding, alight -- a way opened up before me that I had never seriously considered before.</p><p>"Where were you last night?" I asked.</p><p>A twist of disgust disfigured her mouth. "<em>That's </em> what you're butthurt about?" I merely looked at her. She surrendered and said, "With the Fifth. Not talking, just -- listening. They're good people, Harrow, I know you've never seen one of those before. They told me some stuff."</p><p>"<em>Stuff </em>? What stuff?"</p><p>"House secrets," Griddle said instantly, guessing the intent behind the question. "Ancient Fifth secrets about tea. And crumpets. Incredibly juicy, and I'll never tell you any of it, so you can shove your insane paranoia where Dominicus don't shine."</p><p>I took a moment to breathe through the heat like rage that flushed my chest and neck, up into my face, as it had the morning of Drearburh's last muster call when I'd sabogated her shuttle attempt and ground her face into the dirt. I had been vulnerable then, though I'm sure she didn't know it. I was vulnerable now.</p><p>"You're right. I am terrified," I said. "I have never been more terrified. There are dangers here I cannot guard against and variables I cannot control. I want to preserve the Ninth House, Griddle, and I will do whatever is necessary in service of that goal. If you are finally ready to carry out the duties your House demands of you, then I would… not object… to accept your service."</p><p>“My House can go suck Crux’s eggs,” she said. “My duty is keeping your bony ass alive until you release me to have an actual human life. So if you could try to stop being a huge bitch and making it as difficult as possible just to spite me, I would really appreciate it.”</p><p>After a while she added, “Not like it matters though, since we're gonna die out here anyway.”</p><p>"We are not going to die. Dying is not acceptable," I told her. "Nor is it in our nature. The Ninth House is unyielding. It is resolute."</p><p>"It is stranded in the middle of fuck-all," she pointed out.</p><p>This was true. The water and sky around us were flat gray, dark and shifting below, cold and changeless above. The very faintest suggestion of a shadow that might have been the ship loomed before us; but other shadows loomed behind, and we had no way of knowing which one was safety and which damnation.</p><p>Well, <em> she </em> had no way of knowing. I could see that only one of them ached like an infected tooth and wriggled, hollow with maggots, like a migraine aura. With a flick of my wrist I changed the rhythm of the rowers, sending us straight toward it.</p><p>Griddle grew tense as a cramped tendon, clutching the pole of her spear. "You can see it? Are you gonna flip the fuck out again?"</p><p>As we drew closer I tried not to imagine that I could already feel that tar pit of madness beginning to suck at the bottom of my brain. "Most likely. I didn't think the effect would be so… immediate."</p><p>"Hang on, you <em> knew </em>that would happen?!"</p><p>If there was to be any semblance of a working relationship between us, this would have to be its foundation. I said, "I had glimpsed the possibility. My research indicated these beasts are quite capable of rendering their pursuers mad." I hesitated, hating the weakness of it, but I needed to know. "What did you see?"</p><p>"Me? Nothing but you flailing and screaming and puking blood, which was enough madness to fuel my nightmares for a couple years, thanks."</p><p>I concluded, "Then it only affects necromancers. Nav, you'll have to take the offense. What do you need?"</p><p>She stared at me for a long moment, as though I had spoken in an unknown language. Her tongue darted out and tasted a drop of blood from a split lip. "A sword," she said at last. "A real one. And like fifty more of these." She waggled the spear at me.</p><p>I gathered up splinters of bone and grew her an osseous arsenal. With each flex of thangery, the pull of the creature grew stronger -- like a pressure headache, but worse. Like a pressure headache that builds while you're walking barefoot on a razor wire over a screaming abyss.</p><p>"Less blood on them would be great," I heard Nav saying, but I ignored her. The pink smear of blood sweat from my dripping forehead and palms gave the spears a fierce ambiance that I thought quite suitable. Just ahead, the horizon throbbed.</p><p>I did not notice that I had stopped making weapons, or that I had started screaming again, until I blinked and found Nav crouched in front of me with her hand over my mouth. She looked stricken. Her palm, filthy and calloused, was rough and warm against my lips. I stilled the instinct to bite and looked a question at her.</p><p>"Look. If your brain falls out your ears it's none of my fucking business," she said in a voice that did its best not to shake, "but every time you go gaga we lose our ride." This referred to the skeleton rowers, which were collapsed at odd angles without my will to sustain them, except for one which was determinedly bopping its neighbor's calvarium with its oar like a broken toy. And beyond that --</p><p>"Hey! Nope! Eyes on the hot chick!" Griddle had released my mouth and gripped my chin, keeping my head bent a little forward so I could look nowhere except at her face.</p><p>“If you find a <em> hot chick</em>, let me know and I’ll look at her,” I muttered. In fact the face of my Beloved hovered in the air over Griddle's shoulder, radiating beauty that slapped my face like a chloroform-soaked rag, but I couldn't let her know that. So I kept my eyes on my cavalier.</p><p>Under the muddling influence of the Resurrection Beast, even her face had changed. It was pinched and furrowed with a look that almost resembled concern. My throat was coated with ash, and my hands trembled; I realized with a start that she held them both in one of hers, perhaps to keep me from trying to strangle myself again. An odd blood-hot feeling unfolded and undulated behind my sternum. I record the effects of the Resurrection Beast's madness so others might learn to recognize them, and be prepared: in addition to visions it makes one's skin hideously sensitive. Griddle's hand on my face sent shivers through each of my bones and into my viscera that I could not dismiss or hide.</p><p>The moment was supremely awkward. "Fuck, Harrow, you hurt all three of my feelings," she said, feigning chagrin. She let go of my hands, and without taking her eyes off mine, she lifted the hem of her own tattered cloak and tore off a strip with her teeth. "Here," she said, and held it to my face.</p><p>I flinched back. "Get your slobber away from me --"</p><p>"Says the person who's leaking fluids from <em> all of her skin</em>," she retorted, and succeeded in tying the thick cloth around my eyes. It was Ninth black, death black, and effective. I could see nothing through it. </p><p>Her touch on my knee nearly startled me into leaping over the side. "Can you still row like that?"</p><p>My necromantic senses were of course unchanged. Each chip of bone around us felt like a severed part of myself, still knit in the rich net of thanergetic connections. With a few swift pushes I got the rowers back into position and hauling us forward, wary of more revenants. I said, "Tolerably. With the caveat that I have no idea where we're going."</p><p>"I'll be your eyes, dread captain," she said, and it almost sounded like she was serious.</p><p>The rocking of the boat was more unnerving without any kind of visual frame of reference, but I was forced to acknowledge that the squirming aura of the Beast was greatly lessened now that I could no longer catch sight of it, even peripherally. I cautiously gripped the sides of the boat to steady myself. I was near the back -- she must have positioned me there after my fit. I heard the dull<em> thunk </em> of her ostentatiously unsubtle steel-toed boots as she moved away, towards the front -- the prow.</p><p>"If you crash us into anything, I will grind you down for bone powder and use <em> you </em> to row next time," I said, but I was not sure if she heard me. It was a good plan, in that I could not think of a better one. Even she probably couldn't run us aground on something that was the size of all of Drearburh.</p><p>For a long few minutes there was only the splash of the oars hitting the water, the malignant hiss of the things that lived in it, the creaking of the boat as it skewed from the waves or Griddle's movements. I heard my own heartbeat like a demented clock, like a death's-watch muffled in wet meat. Splinters bit into my palms; I welcomed them as a grounding link to what little reality I could trust. A high keening seemed to drift ahead of us, so faint that it was quite possibly a hallucination. At any rate it was not a human sound. I tried to keep my will focused on the movements of spines and upper extremity bones, pushing the humerus of each rower at an angle that would compensate for the fact that there were no muscles or ligaments to lend force or balance to the stroke.</p><p>"I think I see it!" Griddle called.</p><p>Curiosity overwhelmed me with an unhealthy hunger. "What does it look like?"</p><p>After a considered pause, she shouted back, "Lumpy!"</p><p>"<em>Lumpy?" </em></p><p>"Yeah, like the porridge that comes in those little bags! Oh, shit --"</p><p>The boat pitched hard to the left as something struck it from beneath. My grip on the sides earned me scraped palms but kept me from falling into the gullets of the slack-jawed souls that my imagination painted in gruesome detail on every side. One of the rowers was not so lucky. I released my grip on it as it sank and grew a new one from a spare scapula, complete with ossified oar grafted onto the joint of its humerus.</p><p>Without the slightest idea what toothed cavern we might be plunging into, I drove us forward. A squelching <em> thump </em> and the boat shook again. Nav let out a hoarse yell. I strained my ears but couldn't hear if she'd fallen overboard. </p><p>"Nav! What's <em> happening</em>?"</p><p>"Fucker's got tentacles!" she shouted, out of breath but apparently still breathing. Then she added, "They kind of look like swords!"</p><p>Since my birth I have been the sole hope and steward of a dying House. I have watched and felt scores of my own people spasm and expire, choking on their own secretions or throttled by their own blocked arteries, all the while knowing that each life extinguished would not be replaced. I have presided over the slow, guttering descent of an entire civilization into the death from whence there is no resurrection. Yet I say without deception that I have never felt a sense of dread or doom so strong as I did when I heard Griddle say <em> They kind of look like swords</em>.</p><p>The boat shook again from another bruising blow. "<em>Nav</em>!"</p><p>"Left! Go left --"</p><p>I yanked on the left-hand rowers. We were flung sideways, then rocked violently back. Through the pressure on the skeletal oars I felt something dragging at us, a sucking current. The high keening had stopped and I heard instead a sort of buzzing that sent tremors through my maxillary arches into my teeth. I tasted blood. Well, more blood.</p><p>The sensations I report one at a time were in actuality a tumult of impossible confusion. It was like being sealed into a coffin and thrown down the stairs that lead from the snow leek fields to the doors of Drearburh. I narrowed all my will and focus into the constructs. One of them shuddered as something hit it; Nav, falling clumsily against it and using its ribcage to lever herself back up. I repaired the breaks in its spine. She shouted "Right! Oh fuck -- more right -- aargh --" and produced a series of fleshy <em> thwacks</em>. The bone cage I had built over the boat shattered under a titanic blow; I heard it break and felt the rain of sharp phalange-sized shards. Somewhere ahead of us and to the right I heard a high-pitched, definitively human scream.</p><p>From directly ahead of me I heard a pained gurgling. "Nav!" I shouted. My stomach churned and roiled. I dared not stand, for fear I'd be flung immediately over the side by our frantic pace. I started to grope forward on hands and knees, but my hands met only wood, water and bone. I shouted, "Nav, answer me!"</p><p>Nothing. I could feel the bone filling the bottom of the boat, and among the chips and splinters I could feel the bone sword I had made. Lying abandoned. And there, beside it, first detectable only by the shape of her imprint in layers of bone dust, was my cavalier. As I strained to encompass her, I began to be able to feel her thalergy signature -- weak as all thalergy is to thanergetic senses, barely detectable compared to the necromantic energy of dead organic matter -- weak but unmistakably there, like the hum of a metal strut vibrating at a pitch just fractionally above the threshold of human hearing, just before it gives way.</p><p>I felt the displacement of air as something gigantic swept over us, and had no trouble picturing the tentacle hovering to smash us into kindling. I could try to defend us with another shield of bone against a threat I couldn't see, or I could rely on my possibly-unconscious cavalier. With a desperate lurch I tried to pull on Griddle's thalergy signature, to get her up, to get her fighting, to get her to say something.</p><p>It was like falling into a vat of boiling oil. Nerves I didn’t have blazed with pinprick agony while all conscious awareness was razed by a blank white scream of static. If I’d had room for any thought at all, I’d have thought that my blindfold had slipped. But this was not madness. After the first buffeting shock, I thought I began to recognize patterns in the noise, like piecing together a smashed skeleton through a flurry of razor blades. I frantically sought grounding in the familiar and found it: calcium and phosphorus. Parathyroid fluctuations. Hunger and glucose, terror and blood pressure. Pain and adrenaline. I felt a right arm stabbed with burning agony and a torn latissimus dorsi, acid burns smoldering on unfamiliar skin, and bruises as from a fistful of thrown stones. And through it all a wail like a fire klaxon screaming <em> get up get up get UP GET UP -- </em></p><p>Then Griddle opened her eyes.</p><p>The sheer overload of sensation nearly shook me loose, but I clung grimly to this new awareness, even while I tried not to think about what it might mean. I could see what she saw, though layers of clinging film seemed to cover her eyes, spangling everything with hallucinatory rainbow hues like a badly-refracted lens. I saw the side of the boat and the jagged remains of my bone canopy, all bright-edged and out of focus. I saw the River rushing by us. We were still moving -- I had managed, more or less unconsciously, to keep my grip on the rowing constructs. </p><p>Griddle turned her head and I saw myself, in the fetal position in the bottom of the boat, literally drenched with blood, looking like something that had just that moment been squeezed out of a chrysalis halfway through its metamorphosis from maggot to full-grown monster. I saw Griddle check that the black cloth was in place over my eyes, and that I was breathing. Then she looked up.</p><p>The tentacle did look like a sword. A huge straight serrated blade of cartilage -- or whatever incarnate genocides use for cartilage -- as long as the boat and dripping black muck. It slammed down. Griddle yelped and threw herself back as it shaved off the prow. The carved figurehead of the jawless skull fell and was lost. Griddle collided with a rowing construct, and the pain of its oar hitting her bruised hip shrieked like a muster bell in my skull. I cut thanergy to the construct and it drooped as she freed herself, but the boat swung wide to the right.</p><p>The tentacle was coming up for another pass. Nav struggled upright, got herself into a stance I'd seen her take a thousand times and had never thought about -- this time I watched and felt how deliberate it was, how precise even where it looked sloppy. Feet planted for maximum stability and strength, calcium longsword at the ready. I felt muscles clench that I definitely do not have, and that I'd never known she had either.</p><p>The tentacle twitched. "Harrow! Go left!" she bellowed, but I had seen it and was already turning. Then a complex muscular sequence blotted out my awareness of her sensorium; I tried to scream and didn't know whose vocal cords were spasming, whose pyloric sphincter rebelled. Griddle ducked and spun, her brain and body a single instrument pointed towards a single purpose. Her sword cut deep into tough, leathery flesh just below the bottom of the cartilage blade.</p><p>She did not sever it; the angle was wrong, she could bring only so much force to bear from underneath. But the blade flopped at the end of its fleshy appendage, half-avulsed, hanging by less than a third of a tendon. Blood or its equivalent spurted in gouts over us as I yanked the boat hard left to avoid the flailing thing.</p><p>"You come into my house!" Griddle shouted as the wounded tentacle dropped behind us. Which made no sense, but I could hardly throw stones in that regard.</p><p>Ahead of us the monster loomed, but it was obscured as Griddle dropped her sword and dug the heels of her hands hard into her eyes. I could see her confusion at the changes in her visual field, terror that the monster's blood might have worked like acid on her retinas, or that she, too, was about to go mad.</p><p>"It's me," I croaked. She didn't hear. It took a great deal of effort to perceive two sets of lungs, to expand one while the other deflated beyond my control. "Nav, it's me! I'm using your eyes!"</p><p>My voice was a thin, cracking thing, a hollow reed, but it pierced her like a trumpet. She dropped her hands and nearly leaped backwards, which would have sent her plunging out the demolished prow of the boat. "What? Get out of my head, you creep!"</p><p>"Believe me, I'm not enjoying it either!" I croaked. "But it's the only way --"</p><p>Another tentacle came lashing at us swift as thought. Nav scrambled for her sword and just hauled it up in time to parry, sort of. The blow rattled her bones and loosened a few of her teeth, but it gave me time to change our direction and drive us like a winged thing onward through the water.</p><p>Nav turned and looked at the Resurrection Beast. It rose up before us, half-submerged, a great gray lump of gristle and flesh perhaps the size of the <em> Cenotaph</em>. The scale of it was completely preposterous. There was no way we could kill it. We had no other choice.</p><p>A blue flare pierced the gloom. I took it for an artifact of our doubled vision, but Nav squinted off to the left and I discerned one of the other boats, wreathed in a nimbus of cerulean fire. At the prow Lady Abigail Pent stood as though crucified, completely alight, her eyes flaming blue pits, gouts of ghostly radiance pouring from between her teeth. I thought I saw her cavalier husband behind her, but if he was there he was so shadowed as to be invisible. Beyond them another boat bounced on the surface of the River in a way that made no sense to my brain or Nav's, until I realized that what I had taken for oars were actually whips, apparently made of pure fat, lashing the flank of the Beast. On our other side, a boat with two scarlet specks in it surged forward, then dropped back, and I heard a <em> crack </em> I did not recognize.</p><p>The Beast rolled in the water. The wave that crested towards us nearly swamped us and sent us to dance with the revenants; I only just got us turned in time. Nav lost her footing and might have slipped, but one of the constructs snagged the back of her shirt and held her like a flailing kitten until she got her balance again.</p><p>"Right," she said, "fuck this asshole," and she reset her stance, snatched up one of the unbroken bone spears that still rolled about the bottom of the boat, and hurled it straight at the Beast.</p><p>It was a magnificent throw. The spear arced in a perfect parabola. It sank into the monster's pebbled hide and stuck there, as bothersome to it as a twig would be to a tank.</p><p>"Should have seen that coming," Griddle sighed. But we had apparently drawn its attention. It surged and swelled, bringing a new facet to bear on us. Only this one shimmered with necromantic traces -- for what purpose? How could such a thing possess necromancy? -- and there, just above the waterline, a bulging protrusion; glass-green and bile-yellow, about one body tall and one body wide, the monster's far-seeing eye.</p><p>"Nav! Down low -- dead ahead!" I shouted.</p><p>"That's what she said!" my idiot cavalier bellowed. Then, more reassuringly, "I see it! A little left!"</p><p>I pulled us into alignment with that gaping lens and clouded cornea. It had no visible pupil; it may not even have been an eye. But it was flesh, and unshielded by chitin or scales. Nav wound up, and with a whoop of "<em>Eat sword! </em>" she hurled her longsword like a javelin, straight and true.</p><p>The eye burst like a jelly dropped onto an iron spike. Huge gobbets of aqueous and vitreous humors pockmarked the surface of the River. The Beast roiled and roared: a sound too terrible to be heard. I felt Nav's ears oozing blood. Mine probably did as well, though I was already so encrusted with blood sweat it was impossible to tell. </p><p>I was jolted out of Nav's brain, confined again to the darkness of my own locked skull. For a moment I drowned in the panic of a trapped animal; then the warm, blood-slimed bulk of my cavalier dropped more or less on top of me, just before the world bucked like a wild animal and jolted out from under us. Instinctively I yanked hard on every bit of bone I could reach and meshed them together into a shallow disk, at least three bodies wide. I landed on it with an impact nearly hard enough to dislocate both arms, and melted the bone surface beneath me enough to lock my hands into it, and clung desperately as the shock waves of the Beast's revenge turned the River to froth and fury.</p><p>Nav landed half on me and rolled aside, wheezing and gasping. It was the Emperor’s own miracle that she didn’t crush me to powder.</p><p>For what seemed like a long while I lay prone as though in deepest prayer, my hands sunk in bone up to the wrists, listening and shivering. From behind us came a great cacophony of howls and wails, no longer like an animal but like a thousand-throated chorus of human souls in eternal torment. Something very like it had once been produced by the Drearburh choir. But I did not fear anymore, for I knew the sour note that rattled in that song. The Beast was dying. It knew it was dead.</p><p>I listened too to my cavalier breathing beside me. They were ragged gasps, but they were steady enough. Finally I felt the movement as she lifted herself onto her elbows and looked back at the devastation we had wrought. I tried again to slip in again between her senses and her thoughts, prying cautiously as at a loose tooth, but I couldn't manage it. Perhaps I was too drained.</p><p>I jumped and nearly dislocated my wrists when she touched my face, sliding the blindfold up with her thumbs. Tears sprang to my eyes as light returned. Nav was smiling.</p><p>"That was good," she said. "You were good."</p><p>"Don't get used to it," I said. And then, half-dead of blood loss and the other half of amazement, I said, "You are something else with that sword, Griddle."</p><p>A spasm of some unidentifiable emotion contorted her face -- embarrassment, pride, pleasure, disgust, and mortification all mingled into a desperate wish to be anywhere but here. I knew how she felt, for I felt it too. But there was nowhere else to be. We were alone, on a floating bone raft, in the River. The best she could do was sit up again, looking hastily back to the tumult behind us, where I dared not look. "It's totally wrecked," she reported. "The ship's coming up on it. Guess we'd better head back."</p><p>I closed my eyes and molded half a dozen sets of skeletal legs on the bottom of the raft: femur, fibula, tibia, fully articulated feet. They drove us back towards the ship at a steady pace, but it would take us a few minutes to get within shouting range.</p><p>"Nav," I said.</p><p>"Yeah?"</p><p>"Did you put an eyepatch on a skeleton?"</p><p>"Did I -- oh! You met Pegleg! I'll introduce you, she's great!"</p><p>I let my forehead fall to the cool, smooth surface of the raft. "It's pathetic to name the skeletons, Griddle. They're constructs. They're not real people."</p><p>"Your mom's not real people," Nav said. Then she paused. "Too soon?"</p><p>I was deeply grateful for this, as it gave me an opportunity to shove her, and we reached the <em> Cenotaph </em> without any further unbearable weirdness.</p><p>The <em> Cenotaph </em> is keeping station now beside the corpse of the beast. Incredibly, no necromancers or cavaliers were killed in the hunt, though Master Octakiseron broke his arm and several boats were damaged beyond repair, ours among them. Apparently tomorrow there are arcane procedures to be performed on the body, but we were in much too sorry a state to begin them today.</p><p>Griddle is asleep in her nest. I'll be unconscious again soon, from blood loss if nothing else. But I am grateful that I did not bring Ortus, or Crux. It may be that she's more useful than she looks, or has ever acted. It may be that she is not so eager to betray the Ninth and spit on its rotting corpse as I believed. Many things are possible, here beyond life, outside the demesne of Dominicus. </p>
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<a name="section0005"><h2>5. The Cutting-Tackle</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The spoils of the hunt.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>HOw is this chapter so long?! I don't know! It's a mystery! Anyway, warning in this one for more gore and body horror, commensurate with chopping up the body of a giant monster. Enjoy!</p><p>(Also this chapter is dedicated to bree on the Peoples' Tomb server for specifically requesting a "squish hands in blubber" scene. Hope you like it!)</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> Seventh day </em>
</p><p>I woke after recording the perils of the hunt to a sight in some ways even more perilous: my cavalier looming over me, grim-faced and cloaked in the gloom of our cabin, with one hand on the hilt of her brittle bone sword.</p><p>I was feeble as a worm, as encrusted with dried blood as a beetle plucked from the mud under some forgotten stone, but I could still make my face blank and my voice cold -- cold as the shiver that pierced my gut at the thought she might draw that sword. I said, “Griddle.”</p><p>"I need to talk to you."</p><p>"Don't strain yourself," I said. I fumbled in the lining of my sleeves for a few chips of bone and molded them into arms to help prop me upright -- and to interpose themselves between myself and her blade, should it be needed. I'd thought we had reached some kind of understanding, but perhaps I'd been mistaken.</p><p>"Ha-ha," she said without humor. "I've been thinking --"</p><p>"I <em> did </em> just say, Griddle."</p><p>Her hand left the hilt of her weapon and scrubbed instead at her face, which was mostly bare skin except where a few gray flakes of greasepaint clung to the sides of her nose. "All right; fair enough. I walked into that one," she said equitably. "But I mean it. We need ground rules for this creeptastic necromancer mind-reading power you've discovered. If I have to worry about you sticking your nose into my thoughts, I'll have to take my brain out and scrub it with a cheese grater."</p><p>"Believe me, you're not the only one who needs to scrub her brain after that," I retorted. "Do you think I like listening to your -- endless inanity?"</p><p>"Yes," she said. "So: ground rules. One: life or death situations <em> only</em>. No using me to spy on, like, breakfast."</p><p>"Why would I --" I started, but she wagged a finger at me and said, "Nope, it's Gideon Nav talking time. I'm asking the questions now, bitch! Two: no snooping. I know I'm unbearably gorgeous, but my private thoughts are <em> private</em>, and anyway you're such a prude they'd probably make you keel over dead."</p><p>Nauseated at the very thought of what Nav considered <em> private </em> -- based on her entire history of smuggled reading material -- I said, "I have no objection to that rule."</p><p>"Three: I say out, you're out. If mind palace visiting hours are closed, visitors who don't leave get face-punched. Okay?"</p><p>I considered, but the terms were actually reasonable, and would pose no serious barrier to my progress as far as I could discern. Besides, pushing Nav too hard might jeopardize this new thing between us -- not trust, but a willingness to cooperate, however warily. I could plainly see that such willingness might make the difference between a life of struggle and a watery grave. "All right. We have an agreement."</p><p>She visibly relaxed.  "Cool."</p><p>Rewarding civility with civility, she painted her face in broad, sloppy strokes and left our chambers, leaving me in peace to clean myself up as best I could. There was a sonic in our quarters back in the world of the living, but here in the River all ablutions must be done with water. The water seemed clean enough, which I had nearly gotten accustomed to -- what a waste, to use potable water for rinsing off dirt! -- but it was difficult to look into a half-full basin with any tranquility after watery ghosts had tried to drag me down for an adornment to their mass grave.</p><p>I tended to the burn on my ankle where the revenant had gripped me. It stung, but it was small, and would pose no serious difficulty. Briefly I thought of the much larger burns Griddle had sustained -- but she hadn't complained, and she'd been wearing her cloak that covered her arms, hiding all evidence of damage. I was sure she wouldn't appreciate me prying, and couldn't think of a reason to ask, so I resolved merely to keep a closer eye on her than usual in case her injuries proved a handicap to our future success.</p><p>Adequately attired, I went first to my study closet and, consulting the texts I had hidden there, decided that the Beast we had slain was most likely of the Lunar classification. Probably a small specimen. Then, having seen no one, not even a skeletal construct, I mounted to the deck.</p><p>I have spoken of nights and days, but there is no sun in the River. There are no stars, no clouds, no variation of the sky at all that might serve to mark the passage of time. Nor would there be. Time is a concern of the living, the dead have no use for it. The circadian rhythm of the ship, such as it is, has been a thing of mutual agreement and delusion.</p><p>When I emerged under that dreadfully banal sky, it was to find that no time had passed by any outward measurement. We lay in a dead calm, with not a breath of wind stirring. The sails, which the ship had unfurled to come alongside the body of the Beast, had been taken down. Skeletons swarmed up the central mast, working on fitting together some kind of structure of conglomerated metal and bone whose purpose I could not discern.</p><p>Magnus the Fifth approached me as one would an indifferently tamed animal that one is very anxious to befriend. "Ah, Reverend Daughter! So good to see you on your feet again! That was quite an impressive performance yesterday. Abigail, er, Lady Pent is still a bit indisposed, but I expect she'll be right as rain before long. And yourself -- ah, can I get you some tea?"</p><p>I thought fleetingly of Griddle's promise that she'd learned dark secrets of the Fifth House concerning tea. No doubt they of all Houses would consider something that mundane to be a sacred secret.</p><p>But the thought of Griddle submitting herself to be -- lectured -- by this man, so unassuming as to be ridiculous, trim and tasteful in the way nothing on the Ninth ever had been or could be, disquieted me. Was it his banality that attracted her, his very mildness? Somehow I doubted it. Griddle is many things, but she has never been overfond of the bland and boring.</p><p>Determined for the sake of research if nothing else to find out what depths were concealed beneath those trim brown clothes and polite brown face, I said, "Tea would be acceptable."</p><p>He looked as though I'd just handed him the key to Lyctorhood. "Capital! I'll just fetch some, then -- for myself, and Baron Tettares and Sir Chatur as well. They skipped breakfast," he informed me, with the slightest hint of conspiratorial disapproval, as though inviting me to share in chastisement of a mild sin, "because they were too excited to see the dead monster. As though they haven't been staring at for hours!"</p><p>"Maagnuuusss," hissed Baron Tettares, necromantic scion of the Fourth House, from beneath a garish clump of orange hair-spikes and what should have been a debilitating amount of metal jewelry. He and his midpubescent cavalier had been hanging over the railing staring down into the water, but had appeared like wraiths at the Fifth's elbow at the mention of their names. "Don't talk about us like we're not <em> here</em>!"</p><p>"No, you're quite right. Reverend Daughter, may I introduce Baron Isaac Tettares of Tisis, and Sir Jeannemary Chatur? Quite a proud family, you know, the Chaturs -- cavaliers since the days of the Resurrection!"</p><p>This praise seemed to wound its subject more effectively than a rapier to the abdomen, but the Fourth House accomplished tolerable bows. "We didn't <em> stare at it </em> for hours," Sir Chatur informed me, aggrieved. She wore only slightly less adornment than her necromancer, but her hair was more reasonably pulled back into an unraveling braid. "We're <em> studying </em> it."</p><p>"I'm sure the Reverend Daughter would be very interested to know your conclusions," the Fifth said brightly, and bustled off to find tea, leaving me at the mercy of his pimply proteges.</p><p>"Do you want to have a look? It's not so bad," Tettares said earnestly. "Not like when it was alive. Abigail and Magnus wouldn't let us go on the first hunt, but we'll be ready for the next one -- we'll know all its weaknesses."</p><p>"Like the eye," his cavalier butted in. "We saw you and Gideon the Ninth, stabbing it straight in the eye --"</p><p>Her necromancer sighed hugely. "<em>You </em> saw it," he said, with a greater depth of mourning than I have seen at any Ninth House funeral.</p><p>"Well, yeah? Your head would have fallen off if you'd looked? But I told you about it!"</p><p>"It's not the same." With this glum pronouncement he started to drift back to the rail. His cavalier followed him, and I found myself drawn in their wake. It was true that I didn't feel the same spine-churning, gut-knotting sensation of imminent departure from reality that had marked confrontations with the living Beast. The miasma now was much fainter, merely the sort of nausea that accompanies the later stages of blood loss. As we neared the rail, Chatur hissed something at her necromancer, and with another mournful sigh he tugged at what I had assumed to be a kerchief, but was in fact a blindfold of navy cloth that he pulled up to his forehead, where it could be easily yanked down over his eyes.</p><p>"Jeanne saw you do it, it's a good idea," he said, profoundly embarrassed, when he caught my gaze on him.</p><p>Cross and embarrassed myself, I looked over the side of the ship and saw my Beloved floating there. </p><p>She was as large as the <em> Cenotaph</em>. Her skin was grainy and moved with deep, upsetting currents, as though she had been molded out of smoke. Otherwise she was exactly as I had seen her, the day I had climbed down into death at ten years old with Griddle's blood on my hands and my own destruction festering like a brood of maggots in my mouth. The day I had decided to live. As she had then, she rested on her back, hands clasped atop her incomparable sternum, hair spooling out in salt-soaked whirls of an indeterminate color like starless space. Her mouth mocked and despoiled the supremacy of God. She floated in perfect beauty and perfect sleep, apparently unwounded, eternally dead.</p><p>"Yuck," Sir Chatur hissed at my elbow. Her necromancer hissed back, "Which side is its head, anyway?"</p><p>Unsteadily, I withdrew, wary of losing whole days and weeks in contemplation of that face as I had so often in my youth. Unfortunately I was so dazed that I nearly collided with Magnus the Fifth, who was bustling back with his indefatigable smile and his apparently indestructible tea tray.</p><p>The smile acquired a few overtones of consternation as he beheld me. "They made you look at it, didn't they? I do apologize, Reverend Daughter --"</p><p>"It is of no importance," I replied coldly, cutting him off before he could begin some sort of elaborate Fifth formality. The mug he handed me sloshed with a thin, brown, bitter concoction that looked like silt in water, and smelt so strongly of heat and tannins that I merely held it, unwilling to actually let it touch my tongue.</p><p>At least the Fifth did not press me. He began to say, "Reverend Daughter, I had wanted to ask -- if you'll pardon the intrusion -- how you're getting on with, er -- everything?"</p><p>The motion of his head seemed to impart a significance to his <em> everything </em>that I did not at all like. Seeing at once how I bristled, he quickly said, "Never mind, quite right, none of my business," made a small, trim, perfectly correct bow, and went to join his charges at the rail. There he handed out mugs and what seemed to be stern remonstrances on appropriate behavior in the presence of a black anchorite.</p><p>I took the opportunity to survey the terrain. The Sixth had most probably not slept; they were settled by the rail about halfway down the length of the ship, the Master Warden sitting with his back to the monster in the water below, his cavalier perched precariously on the rail itself, sketching with charcoal on wide sheets of flimsy bound onto a board. The Warden's lap was already cluttered with these depictions, likely representing hours' worth of work. The Second stood in murmured conference by the ship's wheel. The others soon began to emerge like cicadas hatching after a years-long sleep, surfacing in pairs to blink at the light; none of us could rest well or deeply, knowing what kept us company, nestled snug beside our vessel like two bodies in one grave.</p><p>General interest drew most to the side, where the cavaliers gaped while the necromancers variously flinched, moaned, and shuddered. All except the sisters Tridentarius, who regarded the monster quite as coolly as their cavalier did. Though when she turned away with a flippant remark I thought Ianthe looked just a few shades paler than before.</p><p>Last to emerge from the cabins was Lady Abigail Pent, looking quite pale herself, though not suffering any outward wounds. Her husband crossed to her at once, quick and solicitous, and she accepted his saccharine fussing with a serenity that spoke of an intimacy indecent between a necromancer and her cavalier. In addition to being a sacrilege in its own right, it set a terrible example for the Fourth House they coddled. Though admittedly, at that moment the Fourth House seemed to be in a contest to determine who could best spit on the Beast's carapace. But what if they had seen? Do the Fifth not realize that condoning the intermingling of necromancer and cavalier undermines the very contract set up on the day of the Resurrection?</p><p>Precisely when she was least wanted, Griddle turned up. Her mouth and both hands were full of scraps of bread, which she quickly hid about her person in places I do not wish to recall. I comforted myself with the reflection that I would have to fear no undue intimacy from that quarter. Despite her recent overtures of cooperation, my cavalier has hated me, quite rightly, since the day I was born. Her intellect may not be swift, but her instincts are unerring, and she's known me for a monster from the cradle. Not even a force the likes of a Resurrection Beast can change that.</p><p>As I was ruminating on her undying hatred, she looked at me with a furrowed brow and mouth half-agape, so stupid-looking that I jabbed her in the solar plexus to get her to shut it. "What?"</p><p>"You're drinking tea?" she hissed back, and only then did I remember the cooling mug still clutched in my hands. I shoved it at her, irritated and wishing to be rid of it. She took it, and looked from it to me and back again, then shrugged and sucked the lukewarm liquid down. When we were children I used to tell her that the story of her birth was a lie, that her mother must have been a trash-disposal chute. Sometimes I still think it must be true.</p><p>Activity was increasing around the central mast. Gradually most of the attention on the deck was redirected from the Beast to the scurrying skeletons fastening together huge struts of dark metal and half-rusted chains whose links were as thick around as Griddle's waist and required half a dozen constructs to lift. One by one, their individual tasks completed, the constructs dropped or shimmied down the mast and fell to attention, arms tucked behind their backs, at parade rest more perfect than the best living Cohort legion in the galaxy could have achieved. In a sort of instinctive mimicry, we living passengers fell silent as well.</p><p>A hatch banged open in that stillness and made us all flinch. Griddle dropped her mug and made a soft sad sound as it broke.</p><p>Teacher climbed out of the hatch and surveyed us with a sort of worried anticipation -- emotions had become difficult to discern on his face since our River crossing, but his voice was unchanged. "Well then! Whom amongst our brave cavaliers shall be the first to claim the honor? Step up, step up! Don't be shy!"</p><p>This was met by blank incomprehension. Septimus, whose cavalier had carried her up onto the deck and settled her into a sort of collapsible wheeled chair, coughed, wiped her mouth with a handkerchief offered to her by the quiet Master Warden, and said quite politely, "I'm sorry, what honor would that be?"</p><p>"Why, the honor of being the first onto the Beast! To attach the chains!" Teacher pointed helpfully at one of the aforementioned lengths of chain. There were four of them, all easily long enough to reach from the top tier of Drearburh to the lowest point of the pit. All could have been Drearburh-forged, from the dull, grueling, immovable solidity of them. Each had one end fastened into the contraption on the mast, which now looked something like an electric lift mechanism and something like a bird's nest made of bone and metal scraps. The other end of each chain lay unattached on the deck, as fat and coiled and innocent as adders.</p><p>The Third cavalier looked in genuine horror at the chain, then at the monster over the side. "What, to <em> that</em>? Can't you have skeletons do it?"</p><p>"Come now, Prince Tern! What do they teach you on the Third these days?" Teacher cried. "Would you throw fresh blood onto a new-dug grave?"</p><p>I grasped his meaning at once. The Master Warden, quicker on the uptake than the others, said aloud, "Fresh blood on a new-dug grave would feed thanergy to a germinating revenant. You're saying that a construct's thanergy --"</p><p>"-- would <em> wake that thing back up</em>," Ianthe Tridentarius finished, sounding less horrified and more thoughtful. "Well that's certainly good to know."</p><p>"Several other things would have been good to know," the Master Warden retorted, with a barometric heaviness in his voice that betokened future storms.</p><p>"If there are to be no volunteers," Teacher said with palpable disappointment, "then we shall draw lots, as is traditional."</p><p>"If it please you," said a voice I had not heard before -- a strong, sure baritone belonging to the muscular cavalier of the Seventh, draped in green like a bronze statue gilded with rust -- "I will not have it said that the vital courage of the rose withers before the arctic blast, nor before even the breath of the saints of the Lord. My lady…?" This was addressed to his adept, who reclined at his side.</p><p>She fiddled nervously with the cartilaginous shunt that drained her lungs, twisting it where it burrowed among the folds of her ridiculous gown. "And if I were to forbid you from doing any such thing?"</p><p>"Then I would abide by your stricture, though it would be a blow to the honor of our House," he said somberly. But a very faint expression played about his lips that belied the drama of his grand recitation. Having been subjected to several thousand hours of Ortus Nigenad's idea of grand recitation, I know what the real thing looks like.</p><p>Sure enough, the Duchess Septimus made a sort of huff and squeezed her cavalier's hand. "Go on then if you must, but be <em> careful</em>. I swore to Mia that I'd look after you."</p><p>"The Second will volunteer as well," said the cavalier of that House, stepping forward crisply in her bloody red coat and cravat. She was rather shorter than I'd imagined, with dark skin and hair, every line of her pressed with a neatness halfway to fanaticism. Her necromancer, equally starched, looked on impassively.</p><p>The bright Tridentarius twin pinched her cavalier hard on the deltoid, but this seemed insufficient inducement to get him to volunteer. Teacher said at last, "Four were asked, two answered; and two out of four isn't half bad. Step forward, the rest of you cavaliers! One bone each, if you please, and no shoving!"</p><p>He produced a handful of distal and proximal phalanges. One by one each remaining cavalier stepped forward and plucked one out of his fist: the reluctant Third, the eager Fourth, the apprehensive Fifth; the impassive Sixth and Eighth; and Griddle, who opened her hand at once and stared at what she held until I wrenched it away from her. It was a fourth proximal metacarpal with an unmistakable notch carved into the distal end.</p><p>As I glanced up from it my eyes met hers, and for a moment we shared a look best summarized as<em> shit, not again</em>. But she chewed on her lip and obediently shucked off her traditional Ninth cloak as a pair of skeletons escorted her over to her assigned chain, which they heaved over the side of the ship so it landed with a wet <em> thwump </em> on the flesh of the Beast beneath. Griddle tested its tensile strength with an experienced tug -- a childhood on the Ninth imparts a certain affinity for chains of all types -- and, finding it sound, she began to climb down it as the Second and Seventh were already doing, hand-over-hand onto the half-drowned monster.</p><p>A flurry of dissent had broken out among the Sixth and Seventh Houses, and I gathered that the drab Sixth cavalier had drawn the final lot. Drifting closer unobtrusively, I heard Sextus growling "An unnecessary risk," and Septimus protesting "Not <em> both </em> of you --", but the Sixth cavalier silenced them by saying something too quiet for me to overhear. With untroubled assurance she snagged an abandoned coil of rope, knotted one end around her waist and pressed the other into the hands of her adept, who clutched it as though it were his own lifeline, not hers. Septimus reached up from her chair to squeeze the Sixth cav's forearm. Then before either of them could say anything more, the Sixth clambered swiftly down her appointed chain and was lost to sight.</p><p>This process of chaining the Beast's corpse was only the smallest part of that long day of dissection, yet it stands out most vividly in my memory. I joined the others in peering over the rail -- it was distinctly unpleasant, but I could not let mere bodily revulsion keep me blind any longer -- and watched four cavaliers mutilate the body of my first love. At times the water covered the delicate curve of an ankle, and through that refracting substance the ankle seemed to become a monster's fleshy spined appendage; or my Beloved's head was submerged by a clumsy shove of the Seventh's chain, and her features dissolved into a mouth of horrors and single punctured eye. But that made no difference. I knew this was not my true Beloved, who still lay safe entombed where I had left her seven years ago. Therefore this semblance was merely an illusion, some form of protective camouflage perhaps, and I was not about to be taken in by it.</p><p>The sea that had been calm as a mirror began to roil and squirm, as though agitated by the anguish of the dead Beast. I feared revenants, but none materialized. They seem to avoid the Beast even dead -- or dormant? There may not be a meaningful difference here. Twice the Sixth cavalier lost her footing, and almost fell to be crushed between the ship's side and the Beast's spines; twice her adept hauled on the rope he held with all the strength of his angular frame, and jerked her to relative safety. The whole corpse swayed and bobbed with every movement, and all four cavaliers were dunked into the River repeatedly, only to claw their way back up, gasping and dripping and hacking to expel the stuff of death from their living lungs. </p><p>The Seventh moved ponderously, heaving at his chain with sheer bulk, where the nimble Sixth and shorter Second relied more on principles of momentum and counterforce to drag their chains into position. Under shouted orders from Teacher, the Seventh cavalier stood with his feet planted on either side of the sternum that guarded the dead frozen heart I loved, and he wrestled his chain around my Beloved's neck. The Sixth and the Second performed a similar operation on each of her wrists. The chain links could be locked together with a mechanism like the sliding bolt meant to keep shut the door of a haunted mausoleum, forming a collar and manacles for that which made no attempt to escape.</p><p>Nav was meant to be shackling the monster's ankles. I watched her walk across the curved plane of the abdomen, dragging her chain over one shoulder, wobbling only slightly as the River rocked ship and corpse alike. Without her cloak, her ridiculous muscles appeared to uncommon advantage (as I gleaned from the awed murmurs of Sir Chatur at my elbow). The burns from the revenant’s hands spanned her right shoulder down to just above the cubital fossa, apparently already scabbing over. I was sick to my stomach. Tettares had closed his eyes, but I could not. A wave rocked the girdle of the monster's pelvis, and Nav scrabbled for purchase at the sodden rags of its dress.</p><p>The rotting folds slipped through her hands. My cavalier toppled headfirst into the dark water, her chain with her. I imagined it dragging her down into the depths of madness and without thought spun out a handful of bone chips over the rail, growing them as they fell: fibula, tibia, femur. Bone would float. If it hit the water with enough momentum to carry it downwards, if I incited explosive growth, she should be able to catch onto it. It was necessary to save her, for I could hardly afford to find another cavalier at this stage, when we had so recently cracked the secret to defeating the Resurrection Beasts.</p><p>Then she resurfaced. Her hair was plastered to her face, and most of her paint had washed off. Even from that distance, her eyes glinted gold. I let my half-formed constructs go inert and drop into the water, where the motion of the ship swept them out of sight.</p><p>But not fast enough. The Fourth had seen my furtive movement. Sir Chatur piped up, "Oh -- she's all right! She's very good -- not like the Nonius stories, though." Then she peered at me with curiousity only very poorly fettered by a casualness transparent as plex. "Have you two been paired a very long time?"</p><p>Her adept, on the other side of her, hissed, "You can't just ask people how long they've been paired!"</p><p>"It's just a question!"</p><p>"It's a <em> weird </em> question!"</p><p>Saved by these internal squabbles from having to answer her impertinent inquiry, I pulled my hood up and withdrew a little down the deck for a better vantage point.</p><p>Nav regained her footing and heaved her chain back up after her in one long, beautiful motion, like a theorem perfectly executed. I was reminded of elements of her sensorium and was tempted to try to ride it again, but my vow to her was mere hours old, and I saw no need to disregard it for something trivial. The Ninth House is resolute, and does what is necessary, but it is not utterly faithless.</p><p>Panting and gasping, Nav wrestled her chain into place and slid the bolt home. In the interim, the various rockings and disturbances had increased the corpse's distance from the ship, so she now faced an expanse of flat dark water perhaps the width of the Drearburh landing court between herself and safety. Though she had no particular reason to dread immersion in water the way I did, never having been baptized with knowledge of her own sins in the Ninth's deepest pool, I was perfectly aware that she had never learned to swim. How could she ever have, in our dry natal pit of bones and dust?</p><p>The other cavaliers had already started back. The Second dove in without hesitation and crossed the distance with neat, sure strokes until she could grasp the rope ladder tossed down over the ship's rail by a helpful construct. The Sixth followed after her, with less grace but equal efficiency, helped materially by the tug of the rope still in her adept's hands. The Seventh waited, apparently to see that she got to safety, then turned and approached Griddle.</p><p>I could not hear what was said. But however degenerate and backwards Nav certainly is, she is not entirely devoid of Ninth pride, for she rejected whatever aid he offered and instead spat on her hands (disgustingly) and began to climb back up the chain.</p><p>"Goodness," said one of the Fifth, somewhere behind me. The Fourth tittered and dithered. I merely watched as Nav hung from an iron link five bodies above the surface of the River, tossed in all directions by the stresses on the ship and the monster, so though the air was still she seemed to be caught in a high wind. I reached again for the string of molars around my wrist, but she did not need necromantic assistance. She narrowly avoided being crushed between the chain and the ship as the latter gave an unexpected lurch; then she had reached the rail, and tumbled over it to lie spread-eagled on the deck, drenched and spluttering like a gutted fish.</p><p>The Fourth and Fifth crowded her. I shoved through them and gripped her by the collar of her shirt, now sodden with River water and ripped immodestly where it had snagged on rough bits of chain. "That was a foolish risk," I snapped. The triumph in her eyes turned to sullen hurt, but that was better than that she know how afraid I had been to see her nearly pulverized or drowned.</p><p>Before I could castigate her further, Magnus Quinn somehow maneuvered himself close enough to hand Griddle a small metal flask. "Something stronger than tea, to put a little life back into you!" he said cheerfully. "No need to worry, Reverend Daughter, just a sip -- that's it --" Griddle took a tentative taste of whatever it was and began to cough explosively. I snatched it from her and sniffed at the neck of the flask. It reeked of silver polish, a caustic scouring.</p><p>Sheer anger swamped the crawling trepidation in my nerves, and it was indeed a vital tonic. I pitched the flask into the River, gripped Griddle hard at the back of the neck to keep her from collapsing and choking on her own tongue, then loosened a rib from my exoskeleton into one hand and turned on Abigail Pent, who hovered close behind. "Your cavalier has poisoned my cavalier," I intoned in the voice of the grave. "I demand satisfaction -- his life for her life, if what he gave her was fatal."</p><p>Lady Pent was still pale, and went a little green at my declaration, but only for a moment. To her credit, she maintained enough poise to extend her hands in a traditional pose of conciliation and surrender. "Peace, Reverend Daughter," she said in gentle, cautious tones. "I swear to you by the honor of the Fifth House, by the souls of my own dead mothers, Magnus meant Gideon the Ninth no harm, and no harm was done. It was only a bit of rum -- an alcoholic spirit," she explained when I did not relent, "used often on the Fifth to revitalize someone after a shock. Though it may not always be advisable to give to <em> young people </em> --" this was accompanied by a pointed look at her husband, who was equal parts sheepish and horrified, " -- it wasn't poison. See for yourself."</p><p>Griddle did seem to have recovered somewhat. Her face was flushed, her eyes watering, and she scrubbed at them, further obliterating the last remains of her paint that had survived her dunking in the River.</p><p>I should have released my grip on her then, but I didn't. I did not like how close the Fourth and Fifth still stood, and despite Lady Pent's calm assurances, I did not trust them. I did not trust anything. Perhaps it was an effect of looking so long on the body of the Resurrection Beast, but nothing seemed quite real -- nothing, that is, except Griddle's spinal column, separated from my hand by clammy wet skin and a few layers of subcutaneous tissue, as familiar to me as the tiers of the House where I had lived every one of my days. For a disconcerting moment I was not the one holding her up; the relationship had reversed, and the pulse in her vertebral arteries was all that kept me from blowing away and dissolving in a scene that felt curiously flat and brittle, like flimsy about to crumble from unimaginable age.</p><p>Then Sextus appeared at Lady Pent's side, trailed by his own cavalier, who was toweling vigorously at her hair with a length of burlap. "I can confirm what the Lady Pent is saying, if you'd like," he said to me.</p><p>"I would not like," I snapped. I let go of Griddle's neck and she stood, moving cautiously -- at first I thought perhaps she was in pain, suffering some kind of slow agony, but then saw that she was merely watching me with a wary eye. At Sextus I snarled, "What would qualify you to tell me anything about the state of my own cavalier?"</p><p>As he looked at me I noticed for the first time his eyes, which are a deep and lambent gray, almost luminous in a way I have never seen, so that even behind his unwieldy spectacles they have an arresting power that should have been far beyond the purview of a mere librarian. He said, "Only the fact that I'm the best medical necromancer in the Nine Houses."</p><p>"Arrogance does not impress me, Master Warden," I retorted, but before he could reply or make any attempt to advance on my cavalier, a creaking sound like the hinges opening on the end of the world distracted us all.</p><p>As soon as Griddle had come back aboard, the skeletal constructs scattered about had leaped to a windlass at the far side of the deck. Their efforts had slowly been taking up the slack in the great chains. The one Griddle had used to make her ascent had begun rising, drawing taut until it stretched in a strained, straight line between the pulley at the top of the central mast and the dead thing in the water below. At the next heave, it groaned as though it must surely snap; but instead the whole ship tilted down towards the monster, like an aged penitent pitching into a bow before the altar, tremblingly and without the strength to right itself. I grabbed for Griddle again and caught her shoulder to keep from toppling over the rail. She steadied me instinctively, and reached out an arm to catch one of the Fourth teens who nearly went tumbling past us. I saw the Sixth cavalier snatch the back of her adept's robe, and the Fifth clung to each other, and slowly, slowly, the side of the ship continued to lean towards the water, and I thought we would all soon be adrift on a bone raft, marooned if not drowned. </p><p>Then, just when it seemed the ship could stand not another millisecond of strain, something gave and the tension released all at once, flinging the ship violently back and knocking the scions of the Nine Houses and their cavaliers to the deck in a flurry of limbs and curses.</p><p>Thanks to Griddle's arm I kept my feet, and saw that the Second had braced themselves against a mast, the Third were once again arguing with each other in heated whispers as they regained their composure, and the Eighth were nowhere to be seen. </p><p>Hanging just off the rail was the reason for our sudden deliverance. Under the pull of the windlass, the chain had split the skin of the Beast's neck like a gray, overripe fruit, and its head hung disembodied before us, being hauled slowly and inexorably up onto the deck.</p><p>Its proximity was deeply unhealthy for myself and the other necromancers; I think I must have fainted for a moment. The next thing I knew was Griddle carrying me, in a grip halfway between a distressed damsel from one of her stupid comics and a sack of snow-leek rinds on its way to the compost tier. She set me down with a thump more becoming of the latter than the former. I clawed at her half-dried garments, trying to get back to my feet. </p><p>"Just stay here, okay? And stop telling everyone I'm dead," she groused.</p><p>After a few minutes the disorientation and nausea subsided a little, and I found she had propped me like a discarded doll among a cluster of barrels, tucked out of the way near one of the auxiliary masts. I hauled myself up on the nearest barrel and peered over the top. The deck was awash in -- I hesitate to even call it "blood". It more closely resembled oil -- thick, black, viscous, and shimmering with the same muted rainbow of nightmare colors that had refracted at the edges of my vision every time I tried to look at the living Beast. </p><p>Whatever the substance of that vital fluid, the deck was awash in it. In the few minutes I had lost, the severed head had been fully settled on the deck and now lay like the Rock unrolled, so massive it seemed impossible that the planks of the ship did not shatter beneath it. It was <strike>beautiful</strike> hard to describe. It no longer looked like the human-featured head of God's death and resurrection. It did still look vaguely humanoid, but also insectoid, and with a radial symmetry totally alien to any natural creature I had ever seen. Yet its symmetry was marred by odd deformities that my brain interpreted as cleft palates where no mouth should logically be, or compound eyes bulging in uneven fragments. And at one end it terminated in the gaping wound where its body should have been, still gushing the oil of its vitality into tubs pushed into place by skeletons and then hauled away for purposes I could not guess at.</p><p>Fleshed figures moved around it among the constructs. The Seventh cavalier was wielding a saw in an attempt to hack at what must have been the monster's spine. I was losing time in gobbets, for I blinked and saw that beside him had sprung up a cord of lengths of black bone, and the stump of the spine had shortened considerably.</p><p>Griddle was there too, working in among the others, half-spattered with monstrous gore. A streak of it had dried in her hair, making the rest seem even redder and more garish. She was bent and hauling at something that looked like a fever-dream of a brainstem. I would need samples of the monster. Particularly bone, but brain would serve. I conjured up a wobbly construct and, using it as a support, I clawed my way past the barrels and set out across the deck.</p><p>I woke up in Griddle's arms again. This time she smelled overpoweringly of damp garbage and what I assumed must be ambrosia -- the monster's musk. "<em> Stay</em>," she said, dropping me behind the barrels once more. "You are embarrassing me in front of the nice people!"</p><p>"As if just being you isn't embarrassing enough," I said, but I said it to empty air. She had gone.</p><p>Or not quite empty air. Something long and loose stirred beside me, wrapped in sacking. I nearly impaled it with a humerus before I realized the sacking was gray, and a crop of short curls and pair of spectacles protruded from the top of it. "Good one," said the Master Warden, without moving his head much. "I don't think we've been properly introduced. Palamedes Sextus, at your service."</p><p>He was in a similar state to myself, which was at least gratifying. "I need samples," I told him irritably. "If we cannot examine this -- creature directly, then I will need other means of gathering information."</p><p>"Don't worry, Cam's getting samples. Plenty for both of us," he assured me. Then, sounding as smug as I had yet heard him, he added, "<em> She </em> said we didn't need to bring the extra case of test tubes. Said I was being <em> excessive</em>." He moved his hands, probably trying to emphasize this with quotation marks, but didn't have the coordination for it. The effects of the beast seemed to have put him in a slurred, dreamlike state. "But I was right. Ha."</p><p>I fixed him with as baleful a glare as I could muster. He gazed back peaceably with those eyes as deep as Lethe. I said, "You wouldn't just give me access to your samples. It would be granting me an outrageous advantage."</p><p>"No. Quite right." He appeared to sober up -- at least he tried to sit a little straighter and neaten his robes. "A fair trade, then. Access to Cam's notes and samples -- and she's the best there is -- in exchange for all <em> your </em>notes on the consciousness-transference stunt you pulled to kill the dread kraken." He paused, deep in thought. "And your name. ‘Reverend Daughter’ gets a bit clunky, if you don't mind my saying so."</p><p>"I'm surprised a man of your <em> rumored </em> intellectual caliber couldn't figure out consciousness transference for himself," I said icily. "Unless the stories about the youngest Master Warden in history have been exaggerated."</p><p>"Oh, we did figure it out. But it was rough, as new theorems always are. I'd like to sand off the edges, especially on the matrix of two co-existing sensoria. You experienced turbulence too, didn't you? A new viewpoint would be immeasurably helpful."</p><p>It was, I was forced to admit, a trade weighted in my favor, especially as I would be giving him no more information than he likely already had -- and I had been able to collect nothing but a bit of that oily fluid scraped into a scrap of bone. "Very well," I said, grudgingly.</p><p>He held out a hand to me. "An ancient tradition of sealing pacts."</p><p>I gripped his fingers as briefly as I could manage.</p><p>"And your name?" he prompted.</p><p>I told him. For some reason it was that bit of knowledge gained that brought a look of satisfaction to those startling eyes.</p><p>I remember our conversation, like the rest of that long afternoon, in fractured pieces. We argued about the probable necromantic nature of the process of transference we had both discovered under extreme duress in the midst of the fight with the Resurrection Beast, while on the other side of a few barrels,  that nemesis was succinctly slaughtered and bottled for use. I soon learned that after a sufficient period of rest I could snatch a glance between the barrels without getting so overwhelmed as to lose consciousness. I watched the unraveling of an abomination in time-lapse glimpses: a gray hand, human and massive and as delicately sculpted as in my most perfect dreams, was hauled up and sawed off at the wrist, and when it flopped to the deck it had become a twisted cartilaginous claw that bore no resemblance to any human thing. A long, pinkish, pulsating tube was drawn up and coiled on the deck like so much rope; I could not tell if it consisted of entrails, or was one single gigantic blood vessel. Blood covered everything. Teeth were everywhere.</p><p>I looked for too long at one point and ended up vomiting over the side of the ship, which was embarrassing, but I was in a fever of epiphany and hardly noticed until someone brought me back to my former position, propped up against the barrels beside the Master Warden, who had not moved.</p><p>My would-be rescuer left me and went to him, and I recognized the Sixth cavalier. Camilla. Half of the Warden's sentences started with "Cam and I found", and I was sure that he was utterly besotted with her, which made me doubt if he was in fact as brilliant as he claimed. As I watched she went down on her haunches in front of him and began a brisk, businesslike examination, shining a light in his eyes, tapping his joints to check reflexes, peering in his ears looking for hemorrhage. He submitted to it all with good-humored mildness and long familiarity, as though this were a daily ritual.</p><p>"How's Dulcie?" he asked thickly, when she'd ascertained to her satisfaction that his brain was not, in Griddle's evocative phrase, leaking out his ears.</p><p>"Safe below," she answered. "And she told me to tell you that if you weren't a cad you'd be down there comforting her, instead of risking brain damage up here." At this she glanced pointedly at me, an impertinence for which I would have flogged her if I were in anything like my usual condition.</p><p>Sextus laughed. "I'm the one who needs comforting. Have you got the anatomy down yet?"</p><p>She pulled a handful of folded flimsy pages out of a pocket on the side of her trouser leg and dropped them into the Warden's lap. They were densely annotated charcoal sketches, like the external ones she'd been making before the butchery began, only these were lightly speckled in the corners with that oily black blood. This time I yearned toward them, catching hints of what looked like a map of a labyrinthine digestive system.</p><p>"You're a genius and a marvel," Sextus told his cavalier, who accepted this praise as her due. "But here -- is that the pylorus? Shouldn't the esophagus be --"</p><p>"It's trifurcated," she said.</p><p>His brow furrowed. "But that makes no sense."</p><p>"Inarguable, Warden."</p><p>Despite this pronouncement, they proceeded to argue the point. I hardly listened, as it was none of it worth wasting time on; insignificant details of asymmetrical anatomy, when the real prize was any clue to the nature of the organomineral substance I had read of, that was so vital to 'the process'. If I could find the gland or sac where <em> that </em> mysterious compound was produced, I would have a <em> real </em> advantage -- but one I would lose if I let Sextus glean a hint that any such thing existed. So I closed my eyes and gave my bruised brain a chance to collect itself before I tried to catch another glimpse of the monster, thinking that I should have made Griddle learn how to sketch. I would have to interrogate her later on everything she'd seen. Though of course it would be a miracle if she managed to remember even half of it. </p><p>Thinking of Griddle, and listening to the Sixth House discuss ileocecal valves, I remembered the rope Camilla had so nonchalantly tied about herself and handed to her necromancer before going over the side. A voluntary interweaving of two disparate strands of fate. With a twist of hollowness in my unsettled stomach, I tried and failed to imagine what it would take, to generate that kind of instinctive trust between cavalier and necromancer, between necromancer and cavalier.</p><p>Camilla went away eventually. Sextus pored over her sketches with a hunger that mirrored my own, and I honestly believe he would have offered me one if I had asked. Is the Sixth House such a placid, bloodless place, that they all trust each other as easily as dumb animals might?</p><p>The noise of the work had been plateauing and then decreasing for some time when Camilla returned. This time she hauled Sextus to his feet. "They're about finished," she said, and looked speculatively at me, which spurred me to stand before she could think about trying to haul me up as well. I was dizzy, but not intolerably so, and I followed the Sixth House under my own power as they rounded the barrels and headed for the forwardmost mast.</p><p>Most of the gore had been either packaged for whatever arcane use was to be made of it, or shoveled back over the side. Skeletons were busily hosing and mopping the deck of the worst oil slicks of shimmering blood. Oddly-shaped hunks of cartilage and the occasional wetly deflating organ still adorned the deck, but most of what remained of the beast we had hunted and killed was a wide, low cistern, apparently hauled out of some dim storage compartment and fastened with iron bolts to the decking itself. This had been filled with dark fluid, subtly different than the monster's blood, and the ship's company was gathered around it as though it were a ceremonial pool. It looked about the right width and depth that I could have walked straight into it and been completely submerged before emerging, baptized in blasphemy.</p><p>Griddle was there, waiting with the others. I moved to stand beside her. She must have washed off the worst of the gore she'd been soaked in, or at least let one of the skeletons hose her down. There were still flakes of the stuff in her stupid hair, but otherwise she was tolerably clean. I could tell from her face -- still unpainted -- that I was not up to even that pathetic standard.</p><p>But now was not the time for displays of weakness. I stood in my appointed place and gripped the rim of the tub. My own face was reflected in that glossy gore, as in a mirror darkly. I tried not to look at it.</p><p>Teacher also waited around the cistern, and by the way he drew our gazes to him, seemed to make himself the patriarch presiding over the most bizarre dinner party imaginable. "Cavaliers and necromancers," he said. "You have slain one of the minor pests that plague the King Undying; yet he counts even this small act as an invaluable service. As a reward, you are now all permitted to take part in a sacrament that has not been bestowed on any child of the Nine Houses since the days of the Resurrection. Bathe your hands in the lymph of your God's direst enemy; let its vital energies sustain you, and through you, Him whose Hand is over us all."</p><p>Beginning with the Eighth -- whose robes were somehow still blindingly white -- and with the Third, we scions and cavaliers dipped our hands into the vat of sacramental fluid. Immediately as I touched it, all the nerves below my wrists began tingling with sprays of golden needles, pinpricks like fire. It was the most peculiar blend of thanergy and thalergy I have ever encountered, and the most intoxicating.</p><p>It was not wholly smooth; my questing fingers encountered gristly lumps in it, and recognized their texture as chambered pericardium. I was forced to consider that human hearts served the Resurrection Beasts the way erythrocytes serve humans. The symbolic causality isn't even subtle.</p><p>Septimus, whose cavalier must have brought her back up once he'd deemed it safe, made a face most unbecoming of a Duchess. "Teacher, what are these --"</p><p>"Squeeze them," Teacher suggested. Griddle made a noise but I elbowed her hard just below her last rib. "Break them -- crush them -- as ancients broke and pressed grapes into wine with their dances of celebration -- smooth all out, children, make all one harmonious blending! This is the sacrament of the Lord your God, that you may do with your own hands something like what He has done in creating the very worlds on which we live!"</p><p>I crushed one of the lumps in my fist. A flush of that buzzing, vital thalergy pulsed up my arm as far as the elbow, deadening the nerves with bliss. The faces of the necromancers showed plainly they were discovering the same feeling, while the cavaliers spanned the gamut from disgust to concern. I was too enraptured to look at Griddle's face. It seemed a fitting blessing and reward, after two days of horror and madness, to get to bathe up to my shoulders in what seemed to be the very substance of harmony. Thalergy and thanergy, comingled! Life and Death invaded me, warred and were reconciled. The universe became a scale upon which polar opposites could be perfectly balanced. Never before had I seen use or interest in anything beyond death -- death which moved at my call, which gave me purpose, which welcomed me into its dark and sheltering folds. Life had seemed tedious, a grueling and unnecessary gauntlet I was forced to run each day only to earn that final rest to which I had no honest right. But now, I had wielded death, and it brought me life. I seemed to see how they fit together, unbending bone and supple tendon, the ghost and the shell.</p><p>I do not know how long I stood with my hands in that vat, drunk on a potion that surely could exist nowhere but in the secret glands of such a monstrous thing as the ghost of a murdered planet. After a time I noticed that there were fewer and fewer gristles to be broken open; and once, in my grasping eagerness, I accidentally closed my fingers around Griddle's. They were rough, strong, callused. I felt Griddle beside me, the loud, bright, unignorable presence which I had always found so obnoxious, demanding that I live if only to outlive her, demanding that I fight to keep her from slipping from my grasp; and I felt a sweetness for which I have no name, that suffused me as swiftly as a poison, and lingered long even after I let go, and long after my hands were clean.</p><p>Lost in this reverie, popping hearts like bubbles in the morass, I became dimly aware of a voice I did not recognize. At first I thought it must have been Septimus, but I was mistaken. I could see Septimus across the cistern from me, working as diligently as I was. Her face, as all of our faces, was suffused with peace and fellowship, and she was not speaking. Yet someone was saying half-breathlessly, "Oh, Teacher, it <em> is </em> just like the good old days. Only you can't tell me I was ever that young."</p><p>I heard Teacher reply, "I wouldn't know, I'm sure." And then, more loudly, "Attend, my children!"</p><p>Slowly -- for it was hard to withdraw from that work -- we turned, hands dripping black gore. "We are blessed," Teacher said, "with ever greater blessings -- for the Emperor's holy Hand and Gesture, the Captain of this brave vessel, has deigned to walk among us -- Cytherea the First, Saint of Strength, seventh to serve the King Undying!"</p><p>The Seventh Saint to serve the King Undying did bear a resemblance to Dulcinea Septimus, in the way a painted image of the Kindly Prince might bear a resemblance to His living face, divine and full of power. The Saint of Strength was willowy, with an artful tumble of fawn-colored curls falling over one shoulder, and blue eyes so unnervingly deep they did not seem to fit in her sallow face. She stood out from the canvas of her surroundings in bas-relief, turning the River and sky to flimsy by the mere expedient of existence. A vitality suffused her, totally at odds with her sickly appearance; thanergy and thalergy combined. An intoxicating draught.</p><p>She leaned on an incongruous plastic crutch with an air of playful scorn, as though it were a toy she had adopted for the sake of amusing a much younger sibling and would be discarded without flourish when she rejoined the company of adults. She smiled on us all with an undifferentiated beatific condescension. I heard Griddle make a very small noise in the back of her throat, like a dying animal swallowing its own tongue. Whatever charms Dulcinea Septimus had brought to bear on her, this Lyctor radiated them a thousandfold. One more way to lose her on this voyage into death.</p><p>No sooner had I thought it than the Saint of Strength's gaze snagged on her and sharpened into a focus that I felt would scorch me, though I merely stood beside its object. Cytherea approached Nav, who fell to her knees. I could not blame her. I felt my own legs tremble, but refused to let them buckle. I would have reinforced my own patellas with extra bone, had it come to that.</p><p>"Oh, how perfectly gorgeous," Cytherea the First said, as she gripped my cavalier's chin in one hand and turned her face into the light, scrutinizing her as though she were the first bloom of a new species of rose unknown to science. My heart writhed with black murder, so much rotten meat. My hand nearly darted out to stop her -- only her Lyctorhood, the furnace of holy power that limned her as a gift from the hand of the Resurrector God, stayed me. I feared with a blind panic that my flesh would burn if it touched hers.</p><p>"Lipochrome. Recessive," she murmured to herself. Then she glanced swiftly at me, and it was like a blow. I nearly staggered. "What interesting nightshade blossoms grow in the House of the Ninth," she said, but with a curl of gentle mocking, so that the pronouncement became almost a joke, shared between the three of us. I wanted to claw her eyes out.</p><p>"What's your name, you pretty thing?" she asked.</p><p>"Gideon Nav," came the hoarse answer. This seemed to delight Cytherea the First; she laughed aloud as though at an excellent joke.</p><p>She released Griddle, who slumped and all but toppled over. Surveying the rest of the company she said, "So young! Mercy would <em> masticate </em>them. Can't you just imagine it?"</p><p>This was apparently addressed to Teacher, who was gazing past the Saint of Strength into some distant dream of his own. "I try not to," he answered her, very quietly.</p><p>"Well, <em> I </em>can. Oh, but John would be so pleased to see them. Such perfect little lambs. Aren't you?"</p><p>Now she seemed to be looking at the Fourth House, with an impersonal tenderness as though they really were young wobble-legged specimens of livestock. Tettares had huddled back without shame against his cavalier, who had one arm around him and was staring with a shock between terror and love.</p><p>Perhaps unsurprisingly it was Sir Magnus Quinn, out of all of us, who kept his faculties about him. He detached himself from his wife and went down on one knee into a courtly bow, perfectly formed. Inadequate to the status of a Lyctor, but what could have been adequate, except abject worship? And we had not yet reached that stage of indignity. "Holy Finger, we are blessed by your presence," he managed.</p><p>"Aren't you just." Cytherea the First stepped around the basin and patted him on the head like a faithful dog. Then with a last sunny smile for the rest of us, she retreated with Teacher and walked towards the prow of the ship, talking and gesturing, presumably discussing the finer points of the day's work done.</p><p>I remember looking around the basin at the faces that had been so alight just minutes before and seeing them now drained of all vigor, as though they had been mummified in an instant. I remember in particular the Duchess Septimus, who had an intensely queer expression on her face, so alien to her features that it seemed to perch there like an ill-fitting mask. But I knew it intimately, and so could recognize it even outside of its accustomed demesne. It was hatred.</p><p>Some herd instinct kept us all huddled there even after the constructs had hauled away the basin of now-homogeneous monster bile, and hauled back a much smaller cistern of River water in which we were bidden to wash our hands. The blooms of black we made in that ritual bath stayed imprinted like sunspots on the backs of my retinas. Like black roses. </p><p>The Saint of Strength stayed on the deck for a while, talking airily to Teacher, then went below. All of us, even the Third and the Eighth, stayed above, unwilling on a deep unconscious level to share a warren of dark passageways with a creature so unutterably dangerous and holy.</p><p>"A Lyctor," someone whispered. I don't recall who it was. "That's a bloody <em> Lyctor</em>."</p><p>Eventually Lady Pent had the presence of mind to send the constructs for food. Those among us with the strongest stomachs ate where they sat or leaned, on coils of rope or bits of discarded bone big as driftwood spars. Conversation broke out in isolated pockets after a while, nurtured by the Fifth. I went and retrieved my journal, and am writing this account (in crypt-script, so I need not fear prying eyes) on an upturned barrel, while my cavalier, recovered somewhat from her brush with sainthood, is doing frantic push-ups  on the deck nearby.</p><p>I have seen a Lyctor. I have stared into the heart of one of the stars that burns alongside He who keeps Dominicus alight. A vision of my own future, my transfiguration into something blindingly inhuman and capable of resurrecting my House. This is the goal I will give anything -- my necromantic aptitude, my position, my dignity, my life -- to achieve.</p><p>But she did not ask for my necromantic aptitude or my life.</p><p>Will I give her my cavalier?</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Cyth being the Saint of Strength was inspired by the “John deliberately gave the Lyctors passive aggressive names because he’s a dick” convo that’s happened on the server a few times. Because seriously, he’s a dick.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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